Is there a politics beyond the left's obsession with oppression and the right's with crime?

There is a politics that bases itself on opposition to evil. Evil has had two characteristic forms: sin or crime, and oppression or injustice. The latter is not a form of the former but is sui generis. (M.L. King's mistake was not to see this.). The morality of the bourgeoisie is based on propriety and its close cousin, normality. Bourgeois society posits its own opposition as willing to risk crime in order to oppose oppression. This situates what passes for 'the left' (if it takes up this gambit, as it often does) fully in the domain of morality rather than politics. Politics is independent of morality because it is based not on the rivalries between potential rulers or leaders, but on a vision of social evil and good that is irreducible to individual morality. (Though it can be rhetorically associated with it, as in the writings of the Biblical prophets, for whom a politics exists only as a morality writ large.).

A politics worthy of the name seeks to change the social fabric, a task utterly different from moral-legal prosecutions and changes in the law, whether in the name of ‘rights’ or anything else; we must have the courage to recognize that there are enormous social injustices that are not a matter of someone’s guilt. It is a crime to rob a bank, but what is it to found a bank, as Brecht noted? Racial capitalism, patriarchy, etc., are irreducible to the wrong-doing of the ‘privileged’ social subjects in relation to those morally privileged because ‘oppressed’; racial segregation and gender ideologies have no culprits who can simply be arraigned and prosecuted. And so it really is not a matter of a class conflict, conceived as it must be, as a drama (a morality play, perhaps, not a tragedy or comedy) between opposing subjects and voices. Combatting racial and sexual oppression by merely punishing people who use angry epithets or pursue their own desire at the expense of another, as useful and necessary as these things might be, is not a real politics as it does not reach to their sources, which are both material and ideational. Capitalism is not a crime. How, then, can it be staged? And if not staged, how opposed, and through opposing transformed?

The bourgeoisie contents itself with the knowledge that it lives within the realm of the proper. Its opposite, what it excludes and defines as its opponent, is property's opposite and complement, its other side, crime. The bourgeoisie's constant question is, may we risk or include criminal acts in order to support property, the essence of the just and happy, and thus of the good? The bourgeois left's constant question is, may we not risk crime in order to support opposition to oppression at the hands of the party of property? And both parties answer these questions as if they were merely rhetorical feints, in the affirmative.

A society given over completely to the morality of property will seem to many of the more fortunate to be oppressive merely in its institution of boredom. For what can be said or thought or done, if action to change the state of things in the world we live in is pre-defined as crime? The bourgeoisie knows only the normality of its enjoyments, and the criminality of all deviance.

Much of the left buys into the trap, thinking, but of course we don't care about the risk of crime; that's merely a bourgeois tactic for opposing opposition. Angela Davis famously said this: don't talk to me about violence, when we are victims of your violence. Clearly implied is that this resolves us from responsibility. This is an inverted bourgeois morality: instead of recognizing only crime and not oppression, a certain radical left opposes only oppression and forgets about crime. This has the certain consequence that in the next moment even their own supporters will desire the presence of the police.

We live in a world that tends not to recognize the experience of those who have no part in the distribution of goods, including moral capital and its goods. The Bigger Thomases of our society are treated only as criminals, and this is only made worse by those who cannot be bothered to think about the problem of crime. Which is only one of the capitalist police state's greatest symptoms, which show up its total poverty of thinking, which emerges as soon as its middle class starts to feel threatened by these symptoms and their expression, as they can hardly be expected not to be.

In the perfectly normal world the overwhelming need for creativity would be constantly threatened by the countervailing need to enforce a normality that must oppose it at every opportunity.

Sociologically, and ideationally, the left worthy of the name exists at the intersection between the demands of the poor and precariat for a viable way of living and the desire of people with the luck of an education for a world that is not, like most jobs, utterly bored and boring.

The working class as such is not the bearer of the promise of the future, and neither is any other social subject. A 'revolutionary' or agentive subjectivity that would be placed at the theoretical heart of processes of social change that people could be asked to place some faith in, this only develops as a transformation of existing social determinations. All identity politics exists in a blindness to, or forgetting of, this fact.

The left has always been an alliance of intellectuals and artists radicalized by their thinking, and the poor, radicalized by the desire to survive and have more of the goods offered in the society and accessible to them only with revolutionary change.

The change we in both of these groups can want is a society no longer based on capital and the exploitation for profit of labor power (the ability to do things from which activity profit is extracted, and this now is most of what most of us do, including our presence and activity in social media), to one where most of one's time is one's own to do as he pleases, where the resources needed for creative projects and learning are plentiful, as these tasks are everyone's, meaning anyone who wants them, and learning, participating in public social life, and enjoyment, contemplation, and creation in artistic fields is valued for its own sake and the birthright of all persons, considered as citizens of the commonwealth of the place where they are, because they are there. We will have to disconnect these things from profit, from marketing, from the billionaire's state. The vision of this is most likely to be articulated by people with an education. Many of us are have in fact been proletarianized, but what we seek to do and to be and to have is not given in our given social role, and so it is not merely to seek ownership of the enterprises in which we work, or some kind of transformation of those enterprises, or at least not only that. A utopia for artists and intellectuals will be a post-capitalist society that would have very different uses of things, and relationships to their use. It would be a society defined by the life of the mind and the love of life and nature (without opposing urbanization, destined to continue) beyond labor, self-interest, property, and crime.

Because art begins with social disaffection, the rulers can always accuse the disaffected of potentiality for crime. The mental health system is a machine for doing this; it is entirely bound up with this motive, which is confused in practice with the feeble effort made, at great expense paid by ordinary people, to help people with their practical problems, and to focus the desire for a better life onto goals that are petty and merely personal, tied into sad and sterile notions of health and "spirituality" (meaning that other life that is meaningful, beyond toil and boredom), never wanting to help people become more creative by increasing their effective potentialities.

It is precisely our effective potentialities that the bosses fear. The social control agents know that and they are rigorous in hunting down dissonant potentialities. The doctor's utopia is a church of good citizens, not a place for artists. Which, since we all try to construct the meaning of our experience, is what we all are. We are offered ways of constructing that meaning only through controlling our potentialities. Since the bosses obviously fear so much our creative uses of the dispositions they want to merely keep under wraps and tight surveillance, that must be indicative of a real power that we have and that most of us most of the time find that we are so managed that we manage not to recognize and make good on it. But the 'divine' promise of happiness, now falsified by psychology, as it once was by relegating all hope to the mere normality of the absence of sin (based on the idea, common to Christianity though foreign to Judaism, that the world was created complete and perfect except for sinners and their criminal transgressions and disobediences), -- that promise is one that is always capable of being redeemed by us, as otherwise it would not exist in our memory, but it does. The world is neither gnostic (basically evil) nor Stoic (perfect in itself and only demanding the right attitude (worship and obedience). It is a field of activity of chaotic vital forces, shaped by the formative will of subjects participating in the divine work of creation, revelation, and redemption. This work is joyful, but the world of management is illumined on the whole by a deadening and often deadly sadness. The fidelity we are called to enact is not only to ideals of a more perfect world, but to every failed attempt to escape the toil and waste, to live in the full sense that does not want to abide in the resentment that no one likes. The right envisions paradise as a police state protecting the walled villas of the most fortunate against all that they must loath and fear. In the face of this is an immense task, entrusted to no theory and no privileged subject, including those privileged only in having no privilege. The only ‘spiritual’ task this confers on us is that of the work of thinking, and a think that recognizes how it is affected and remembers, far beyond merely consecrating its noble resistance to figures of evil.