Some observations on oppression, morality, and logic, involving race and other matters

Black people in America are oppressed because of capitalism and how it has used race, not by white or European people and how all of us have used capitalism.

Related to this is that politics is not a war between two different peoples, one of which oppresses the other. That belief is the core one of what might be called radical nationalism, or the national liberation movement when ideologically constructed in a certain polemical way. For such movements can also be constructed as opposed to colonialism and its avatars. The difference is that “class conflict” in capitalism is rooted in political economy and not in identities. Identity politics is a mini-nationalism. And it is wrong in all the ways and for all the reasons that nationalisms always are.

Marxism also differs in that the vast majority of people of all nations and ethnicities and other social types are on the side of labor power. Class conflict in capitalist societies is the conflict between capital and labor power. Labor power is what most people are reduced to in capitalist society.

To date, in every society whose dominant powers oppressed people in other countries or parts of the world, it has also been the case that the vast majority of people in that very privileged country are themselves greatly exploited and oppressed. This was true of the English working class and peasantry even at the height of British imperialism.

Related to identity conflicts are moralisms. They also function as attacks on people. Indeed, radical nationalisms are typically moralistic.

The world consists sociologically of material social forces and ideological configurations that tend to legitimate things being the way they are. Ideological wars may very well target people. It may target them by social group or type, as in anti-Semitism, or it may target individual people morally. If you are an Irish radical republican who hates the British people as such for oppressing you, you are a nationalist moralist. Moralists have enemies; they worry about bad people. What do you do about bad people? You make war against them if they are a foreign nation, control them with policing and other mechanisms of social control if they are a domestic populace, or even try to exterminate them if they are constructed in your ideology as objects of hatred, which are identified as evil.

So opposing identity politics and opposing moralistic denunciations of works of art and ideas go together. Persons are responsible morally for what they do, but artworks and works of thought cannot be innocent or guilty. Some are dangerous or stupid, and so bad. Others are mistaken. Some are ideological, and some of these are used in hatreds. But even individuals who are great sinners or even “evil,” which would mean perhaps that they choose destructive activities out of hate, if they are connected with artworks or works of thought, there is nothing interesting you can say about an artwork or idea except that it is either not very interesting, or mistaken. De Sade is interesting in his writings, even if the man himself was pretty bad. Many moralists enjoy the moral luck of knowing that Hitler was a failed artist and his paintings not very interesting. But what if they were? What if the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger had actually been ghost written by Adolf Hitler? Would those ideas be truly and obviously completely wrong then? We would be right to assume that the historical fact is relevant as evidence, but it would be the kind of information that is an answer to a question that must still be formulated. Otherwise, we could forget about the works. Stalin’s books on linguistics and dialectical materialism are widely regarded as mistaken. It would be fascinating if that seemed not to be true; one would want perhaps to explain the disconnect. The simple refutation of the argument for the short-circuit judgement that equates ideas and works with persons and their deeds is recognized by asking what if an evil person said, or even discovered, an obvious truth? What if Hitler and his followers insisted that 2+2=4 and the opposition were keen on a mistaken arithmetic? Look no further than modern logic and analytical philosophy. Its founder, Gottlob Frege, was an anti-Semite. My question is, the human mind is big and complex enough, why can’t we allow finer grained judgments about what we want so much to be against and for? If you have two entities, call them A and B, and they each have properties, let’s call them the sets a’ and b’, which consist each of a series of elements like a, b, c, etc. Take any element of set A and any element of set B, and you can ask,
do they have any interesting relationship bearing on event BB, which appears to have been a consequence in part of one or more of the elements of A. A priori, it is possible but not certain that the given element of the one set has anything to do at all, causally or otherwise, that forms part of the true explanation of the problem visible in some of the elements or consequences of the other set. All logical and scientific thinking supposes that theses relevant to explaining anything are exclusive of some others. And therefore also that any contingent relationship between two things may hold and may not. It is possible a priori (though contradicted by all the relevant known facts) that Adolf Hitler and not the merely causal Nazi Martin Heidegger wrote Being and Time. Or if you prefer, it is possible that there is a world in which this fact, impossible in our world, holds true. It is further possible in this world that Being and Time is a completely true philosophical theory, even though Adolf Hitler is rightly judged to have been an essentially evil man. That he may have loved his dog and been kind to German girls waving sympathetic flags being a possible fact that we may deem irrelevant.

It is understandable that many people are angry, and being “oppressed,” a condition that may be more or less materially real or rhetorically histrionic, is seen as cause for anger. This is what the figure of the identity politics social justice warrior is typically about. It is too bad that so many people who are angry about injustice cannot have a conversation. The difficulty of conversations that are political is that by definition they involve difference of opinion. There is no more a way to cleanly separate and police the distinction between polite debate and nastily angry argument than there is to police the difference between kind and cruel seductions. The fact of being oppressed would seem to suggest the need for a war of liberation. Fought in some way or other. Marxist-Leninists were right that politics always involves the state and therefore coercion. The society beyond state and coercion will be like the one beyond psychoanalysis that Freud said is the only one, not needing it, where it would be strictly applicable. The always good, kind, and gentle politics is of that nature. This is the realm of law and justice in the messianic age at the end of history. But argument also is politics at its most civil, and politics does not exist unless people fight about some things, and argue about others. Fights that are like arguments are ones that you don’t feel you have to win. Left-liberalism is perhaps that “infantile leftism” (a concept Lenin applied somewhat differently) that supposes that all arguments are matters of violent conflict, a priori. In that case, friends would never argue with each other, and since only enemies would, they would do so with little need for transparency, which would render all arguments strategic battles. But then too friends, who would never disagree enough to argue, would have to be, like many Americans, silent sharers of mere experience most of the time, and social life would not only be incapable of handling even minor problems, it would also be boring to any who likes to use concepts and judgments (or propositions, or statements) to say things, making distinctions, saying this is not that, and this statement is true while that one is false, and this other one may be true or false, and we might need still to decide.

In America, colonialism, manifest as slavery, warped everything in our political culture, and we have as a result these extreme notions of liberty and authority, absolutely and “un-dialectically” opposed to each other so that there is only the extreme of one or of the other. This makes democracy difficult, because a functioning democratic society is one of rampant civil conflict that people choose most of them to resolve based on the fiction that the fellow citizen is not only like the neighbor who is also the stranger, but like the friend, who unlike the mere companion, will tell you when you were wrong, and in a way you may, though this cannot be guaranteed, enjoy. Capitalism in America, in part because of the colonialism that was part of it, left our democracy warped, and people trying to cope with the continuing fact of real and seeming oppression are often left not easily demarcating the boundary between the friend you can argue with and the enemy that you might approach with an ethos that is positively Franciscan yet only as ruse, the enemy you smilingly deliver as coldly as revenge a gifted Trojan Horse.