What the left must refuse identity politics (and its model of civil war)

There is a problem with the liberal-left that it assumes that all injustice is domination. 

There is something you can see in different kinds of crime/police films and television shows. In one kind, that flourished in American television including the show Law and Order, which shows criminals and their crimes only from the point of view of the police and prosecuting attorneys. The paradigm is that the perspective on justice in the story is to show the criminal is guilty, and if he is shown in court, he may break down on the witness stand and cry, “But I only wanted my mummy!” And then we know he’s truly guilty, because this supplies a motive. Psychology is the motive; and in fact, psychology is crime. This is precisely how the concept of “mental illness” differs from the old psychoanalytic one of “neurosis,” which psychiatry today has abolished by fiat: there are no neuroses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Gone too are the days when a Woody Allen (and this is not because the #MeToo scandal morally discredited him, even if now we can speculate about his real psychical malaise that makes him a criminal) could beat his chest on the screen and say that he is proudly neurotic (in a way that he also identified with diaspora Jewishness, scandalously suggesting that he’s alienated as a Jew even in New York). Novelists and others would do this. It is out of fashion in a much more truly intolerant society, with the intolerance shared by right and liberal “left.” Mental illness is understand to be a criminal disposition, and people are involuntarily incarcerated on medical grounds not because they are guilt of committing a crime, not suspects in a way that they could hope to defend themselves in order to be exonerated and free again; they are instead not guilty but sick, not accused but observed, and their sickness implies an effective criminality that is connected to not action but only character. I was incarcerated once in New York by a psychiatrist from some other state (as most medical residents are) for having an Un-American Personality. He said, you don’t seem American. My education is mostly European and I had recently returned from living in France. He leaned forward and spread his arms wide and with one of those salesman’s smiles Americans are so good at, said, “I welcome you to ‘be American’ with me.” Suffer the little children to come onto me. I was aghast and uncertain what to say to this curious Christ. Then he said “You are feeling anxiety.” I mistook this for a question, and said, I’m really alright, thank you very much, but it was not a question. Then he said he was going to look me up to protect me. In “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” a police officer interrogating dissidents accused of protesting the Soviet invasion of Prague, says, pained, “Don’t you know we love you… “ So how can you disobey us? We’re here to protect you. We could have you shot! You hear enough of this kind of thing and you want to say, Give me a little less of what you know I need, including your protection, and making my world and ours perfectly safe and secure and comfortable, give me a bit less of this good, and a bit more freedom, give me the kind of freedom you cannot give by doing anything for anyone, except backing off and leaving, laissez-moi-faire, laissez-allez-les-filles-et-garçon….That is your song to sing; our is “Résiste!”,

It is a key right-wing position that there is no injustice except crime. Society is just the way it is by definition, and injustice can only occur when some person (or group of persons) commits a crime. Some forms of (pseudo-) left wing politics adopt an ethics in which there is no crime, only injustice. (People who say “You must not blame the victim!” when referring to poor people who commit crimes fall into this category. They think that poor people who commit acts of cruelty or violence are in effect excused, if not exactly authorized, to commit violence against other persons because they are among the Oppressed and their targets are among the Oppressors. And, this latter concept being rather unclear, it may be that it is enough to be Privileged to be an Oppressor. This was not the point of view of Marx, though it was that of Stalinism. (Marx wrote Capital while being supported by his friend Engels, who owned a British factory. Stalinist regimes punished the sons of shop owners by keeping them out of universities; Mao’s Cultural Revolution and then Pol Pot would take this further. American Calvinists would say Marx was a hypocrite, but he was no Tartuffe, and bourgeois egalitarianism is quite happily punitive; in Italy, “The law is equal for all” is appropriately the slogan of courts, while ours merely admonish everyone to truth the higher power, which the secular one announces in the idiot of the sacred, or rather, dominationally absolute). It is certainly true that the left affirms that everyone has an experience, a story; indeed, we might as well as say that this too is a theology: everyone is in the image of God, perhaps even differently. Tragedy, the most important birthplace of Western ideas of the political (more so than the Exodus myth, which, though of distinct origin, is thematically not unrelated), affirms clearly that there is always justice on the side of the wrongdoer. In a society existed without this principle, it might be like Calvinism, and thus America: in this theology, there are the drowned and the saved, as the Italian Jewish Holocaust writer Primo Levi put it in a different manner of thinking, and to hell with the losers. Maybe the losers can be put in concentration camps, prison archipelagos, like the American one today, by far the world’s largest, or simply left to die, perhaps while “human right” ideologues and benefactors assure their right to food, clothing, shelter, health care, and freedom from obviously physical violence, without of course needing to assure them of the “privileges” that are normally desired by writers, artists, and scientists, who might want to practice their calling, as was the case with many unfortunate prisoners in the Nazi camps, who, as a matter of fact, generally were not amply disposed of access to book collections, writing materials, or opportunity to correspond with outsiders who share some of their interests or may have interest in their preoccupations, be they sustained or circumstantial. In other words, animal rights and creative privileges. Where does the human being fall into this schema? What should do with human beings we must protect and guaranteed their rights or needs? What about according them the liberty to exercise their own self-determination in this regards? Our prisons generally do allow some access to book and writing, though it is limited; refugee camps with their benefactorial prisoners may not, and places like psychiatrist hospitals (where I was threatened by state authorities in the US as punishment for some unnamed offense apparently linked among whatever else to my work as writer) generally do not.

If the world ever moves beyond tragedy as ethical-political paradigm (and it is nothing less than that in its essence), it can only be to that radical democracy as state of freedom on the far side of scarcity, lack, and ubiquitous authority making everyone it touches rather stupid as it always does. The traditional name for this is communism. Rather than quibbling over names, it is sufficient to reply to objectors that while Marx may be imperfect as its theorist, the old Society Union was, shall we say, a bit more than imperfect. There are reasons for this, they can be studied, learned, followed. The Cold War is over, and with it the logic of lesser of two evils. We don’t have to choose between capitalist liberty and parliamentary democracy on the one hand, with all the barbarism and violence, inequality and squalor, and often enough murderously repressive state apparatuses survival capital, on the one hand, and authoritarian and bureaucratic states running an entire national economy as one company and in the name of totalitarian ideologies that also are not so different from advertising, on the other. The two are not so different; they were and are forms of the same. And an alternative is possible and can be constructed.

Until then, the state will always represent an idea of society as totality, as singular entity constituting and constituted by all of the people of a nation, and there will be what Hegelians called “contradictions.” Tragedy is all about contradictions. While we are still in the social space of tragedy, crime stories are stories of injustice, criminals have a story that is interesting, and everyone you say on the stage or screen or read about in that novel is someone all of us are like enough for empathy and understanding. It is only a stupid right-wing that says there is no injustice, only crime; and a stupid left-wing that says there is no crime, only injustice. And fascism develops out of extremes forms of thinking like that. Indeed, the “left” position here reveals itself as equally moralist; it simply is the moralism of a political Manichaeanism, which thinks the good as only or essentially combat or suppression of evil, and is a form of the resentment that, as Nietzsche showed, says "I am so good because you are so bad.” And that ultimately is a form of what Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Emanuele Severino have studied as “nihilism.” Nihilism says that Being is not good but evil, or simply, being is not good (this is also the stance of Gnosticism), or simply, what is can and must be negated, because what is in essence is not. What appears is not, and can be negated, to show that if Being exists at all, it is only some remote entity in a futural or latent existence, in non-Being. What this can result in psychologically is very angry people (or any society of rampant political angry), or intolerance (as in American Calvinism), or resentment and cynicism (cynics are counselors to the desperate and resigned, who say, there is nothing good, nothing to hope for). You could think you or all of us should get a therapy to fix us up somehow. And then you have the therapeutic state and society, which is a variant of the police state, and corrollary of the policing apparatus of medical psychology and its professionals and expensive pharmaceutical treatments, along with all the new spiritualities that offer or announce some form of therapy. Cure your soul. Salvation secularized and politicized. Maybe at the root of this is so many people needing, for some reason due surely to the way our society is organized: for material and individual and organizational success in various instrumental and strategic projects, to assure themselves that death is not real, evil is not real. Or that good and happiness are not real, and that one is left only with despair, resignation, and cynicism. A law student once said to me, “Maybe you will be one of the few people who do not sell out….”

What concepts of political negativity do we need? It is not true that all injustice is domination, even if all domination is injustice. For it is at least the injustice of lack of freedom, not necessarily of needs met or the "good"; that this is a truism since by definition in domination only party is free, the other compelled.

People who are dominated, disadvantaged, downtrodden, oppressed, or simply poor, can in fact participate in causing violence and wrong to those they theorize as not counting because they are "privileged" and therefore "oppressors" (whatever that actually means).

In fact, oppressors are usually not privileged, nor do they work for the privileged in most cases. Rather, they work for the institutions that employ them and for, or inspired by, ideologies that motivate people and enable them to construct a sense of personality and entity that are in cognitive consonance, not dissonance, with what they do, and also that are functional for the maintenance of the social system. Which, by definition, benefits the privileged more than those who are less so, even if it benefits the more and less privileged in essentially the same ways. (If social class still made sense, it would distinguish classes from strata as having a different form of life and therefore understanding of the world and themselves.)

If a system is oppressive in itself, there is a political ethics or good that consists in the active awareness of those exercising authority of any kind that to be just and good cannot be to merely do their job well (and comfortably) but also requires active resistance or the will to resists in measure as there is dissidence between their task and the good. If we had a true left-wing political party, it would help to institute and cultivate a sense of belonging that promotes this dissonant-capable consciousness. Labor unions alone cannot provide, and probably could not even if they were based on the at least theoretical unity and solidarity of the entire working class. That is interest, and there will always a possible discrepancy between interest and the good. That is why most labor unions in this country are corrupt: they are trade associations and nothing more. It is a corporate ideology in a different but related sense (purposively organized body of people) than the modern capitalist corporation.

A war of the poor against the rich would be left-wing fascism. It would be anti-semitic probably, and maybe other things. We have seen this. The Khmer Rouge was the purist example, Stalinism and Maoism had some of the same elements (and Stalinism is surely a conservative if not deformed form of Marxism). And then there was Nazism, which had left-wing forms and components, especially at the beginning. 

Don't be duped: Hating the privileged race, class, gender, or anything else is fascist. There is a left-wing facism just as there are radically democratic and anarchistic forms of radical left politics. The American liberal-left is closer to Stalnism and so fascism than it wants to recognize. The implacable rage and resentments of the liberal-left are only a misleading indication that this is a, let alone the, radical left. Rhetorical and temperamental, as well as tactical and methodological, extremism is always misleading, and that is its function if not purpose. Much of the left as it has existed in this country since the rise of neoliberalism and identity politics in the early 70s is no left. To this desparate thought corresponds a very hopeful one: Something else is possible. As always, we oppose capitalism at least in its present extreme, authoritarianism and official and unofficial barbarism (and we criticize our friends and allies and reflect on our own mistakes; the pseudo-left will not do that: For example, you may never criticism a black or a woman; though now you can criticize Jews if you talk about money or Israel). What we are for is another, more radical idea of democracy, different from the representationalist one (if you can vote for a politician but not argue with your boss, you do not live in a democracy; if freedom is freedom to "choose" alternative commodities made available but not to create something new, and otherwise to play by the rules here or take what we offer you or fuck off, then you are not free). In Europe this idea of democracy was long called communism (small c). Those repressive governments that got overthrown 30 years ago bore the same relation to their idea that our parliamentary capitalism governments do to democracy. Identity politics is not radical equality but Affirmative Action policies generalized, to help people compete by giving them a few dollars head start in the every-man-for-himself rat race. The resentment it gives rise to is proto-fascist at best. Fascism was most often not a refusal of the left but a betrayal of it, or a cynical simulacrum of it. The left should bury identity politics. 

The Talmud says do not favor the rich man because he is rich, or the poor man because he is poor. This statement says nothing at all about the desirability of a system that sustains poverty for many as a price of wealth for the few. The left still needs to learn the lesson of Machiavelli: rigorously separate morality and politics. Not because politics should be immoral, but because morality does not constitute. Politics does have a proximity to ethics, which is why art is often political. Ethics is about happiness and freedom is one of its concepts. Morality is about justice, or duty (justice is what ought to be done or exist). Governance enforces morality and every morality is therefore a matter of management or policing. But politics is more. Officials exercising power will always be able to say that they know they are doing the right thing. Their own class writes the rules they will cite as sufficient to show that. But we should want more than what is. That is the key. What is is exceeded not by what ought to be (as some Jewish thinkers argue, like Soloveitchik) but what is possible, and what is possible is not determined by what is actual, which is why and there is freedom. What is possible is what can be made. Politics is a work, a creative work. Nohting could be further from the politics of resentment, not even some notion of love that in the end ties it to the servility of law and obligation.