R.I.P. Progressivism: My principles

Today there is lots of rage.

Whether such "negative" affects are "good" or "bad" is irrelevant. Those who speak as such are demanding you adopt a morality that accords with what they want.

Female rage is not against patriarchy. It's real causes are more or less the same as male rage. Same with black and white rage.

People get angry when they feel wronged or when very frustrated.

Moralists say this is bad. But it is normal and true of everyone. Moralists are hypocrites. That is not because they are moral. Morality asks, since here we are now, what is to be done? It usually requires some thinking, though it may rest on principles that are "known," assumed, or given.

The right likes to enforce truths already known; the left prefers to question them. We need "intellectual" culture, which they can use but don't need. They want war, to defend their own interests. Those interests may or may not be greatly endangered, but they need you to think they are, and you are. That is motivating. It is called rhetoric.

The right prefers religion to philosophy and the arts. They prefer nationalism to culture. If they set up a national state to protect their culture, they will do much to destroy it. This has happened.

Moralism does not think, it "knows." It always knows the Other must be guilty.

Moralism is the aesthetics and desire of the police.

The subject of moralism is a slave, the one who pronounces its truths a slave master.

Most people who think they are not slaves are trying to prove that they are masters. They will likely treat you brutally if you don't show you respect them as such.

Women and men do not rebel differently. Both rebel against authority. That more often means figures of a father than a mother, but it does not matter if the representative person in authority is male or female. Nor does any other identity matter.

What matters in power relationships is never "who," but always "what" and "how." It is also not "why," because explanations only justify, and all justification is apology for power. And for the way things are, which is the way they are according to those in power. That the way things are must be followed means that there can be no change. What matters is "what" and "how," because it matters what is done. That some social subjectivity or group is special is just a mystification. It is ideology. Most "political" discussion is ideology. Often its intended function is to justify a course of action. That course of action is usually already determined. You are being told that you must give you consent. You had better, or else.

Feminism attacked a normatively masculine culture and succeeded because the rise of tertiary occupations involving office work did not favor men over women as factory work had tended to do. Feminism also succeeded as a middle-class movement and not as a feature of working-class socialist and anarchist radicalism, which it once was. Attacking normatively masculine culture, it criminalized it as virtual or imaginary violence, a strategy of ruling classes in long use. And it replaced it with a normative femininity. That did not entirely work. Some men resented it. Who can blame them for that?

Another strain of feminism attacked patriarchy. This is a form of social domination. There are other actual and possible forms. No social subject could possibly be inclined necessarily or intrinsically to wield or be subject to social domination in the way that identity-political ideologies have demanded. Those ideologies intrinsically lead to fascism. Fascist ideology typically opposes forms of oppression but only in order for some social subject to assert the will to it on its own behalf, which means victimizing others at least by implication if not also by intent. (Zionism is explicit about this; black nationalism and feminism more implicit). Women are not the only victims of patriarchy; men can be too. The difference is only that a structure of power that privileges a particular social subject will tend to favor them, not that it necessarily does. A feminism that opposed the domination of women or violence against them would be a creative social force. That feminism exists, but only on the left. The left is historically, and remains, anti-authoritarian in essence and for equal liberty, opposed to social inequality and opposed in the modern period to capitalism. A radical politics that does not oppose capitalism is not a radical politics. Socialism is a form of capitalism in which the state controls capital and rules over workers in their name; it may be more democratic, or may not be. The project of the left is radically democratic. If everyone is equally empowered, policing is harder to do effectively because it requires that some people have authority over others, which means they are not equal. A leftist ideology that is not anti-authoritarian or that favors one social group against others is an apology for fascism. It is probably little more than that, perhaps nothing more. The radical left has often articulated memes that are taken up by the right.

Identity politics is dead. Liberals can't stand this. The left should accept it and move on to wanting other things.

What has anchored the left to liberalism and with it the corporate state is the desire to run candidates who win elections and thereby participate in the government. To do this they must appeal to likely constituencies. In the neoliberal era these were staked out, as a set of stakeholding identity groups. And this is now potentially falling apart, because the premise of neoliberalism was that capitalism had no alternative and could not be questioned, so class conflict was ruled out and something had to take its place. Since Marxist conservatism mistakenly promoted class identity as part of the Fordist welfare-state compromise (that left, right, and center in “the West” all adopted during the Depression and maintained in the postwar period), and anti-colonialism appeared ready to promote colonial subjectivities as a basis for its nationalism, race was made placeholder for this absence, and feminist and gay politics followed the model.

That the left succeeds in governmental politics only through such compromises is a problem for those who care about ends and motives, and not just means and opportunities. It means that a left faction or party that focuses on representative politics to that extent must compromise its principles and ends. Most professional activists welcome this with little chagrin, because their principal commitment is to their professional calling. Indeed, most liberal activist types, including the many ad hoc social justice warriors, are, often as amateurs, mainly committed to the idealism of following a vocation as activists, more than they care about their cause’s referents. In Gramscian terms, they are not “organic”; what they are is ideological. We could almost say that what is generated, through forms of mass marketing, is a kind of pseudo-dissidence. It must serve an important function, perhaps to orient or redirect many people towards doing something different than what they might do otherwise politically, though that might also be little or nothing, a possibility that would worry activists who need them. Observers of left-liberal politics might be comforted recognizing that great things sometimes happen amid much that is foolish or mistaken, and that many efforts seem vain does not mean nothing is worth fighting for.

That governmental politics is so compromised entails that any meaningfully left politics must be principally extra-parliamentary. It focuses on that of “the political” that lies outside government and representatives, however it understands this project and configures its territory. Social movements aim to pressure it from outside. At an unmeasurable distance is art, which enjoys a minimal relationship to the Constitution, ignoring its details but using the benefits of the liberal state. That means that artists with a politics must expect to offend some audiences while they put things in question, hoping they survive to create another work. Governmental politics itself is problematic for the left, which, even more than the right, cannot survive without self-betrayal if it locates itself fully within it. An opposition that binds itself to legitimacy is ultimately a contradiction, and absurd. This defines the difference between the left and the liberal center, and is the reason why a ‘real’ left politics is rare. Such rarity is not impossibility, except in a static world that precludes hope, and mistakes potentiality as a domain of actuality. That was the mistake of Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” proclamation; alternatives are not found, but constructed. People seek alternatives precisely because they are in situations that don’t have any. The situations lack potentialities they find attractive, and no others are available. The Stoic idea of nature precluded the future as we moderns understand it, and so the political as well, which is reduced to the management or governance of what is, so that what is determines what can be.

We want an alternative to capitalism. (The liberal Democrats want desperately to save it). We don't have such an alternative, none is visible anywhere today. That means only that we have to construct it.

We on the left want a more democratic society. We also want liberty from capitalism, not through it. The right wants liberty for masters. It will promise its dividends to those who identify with the masters.

Liberty and authority are not opposites, and libertarianism and authoritarianism are not opposites; they are complements. Anti-authoritarianism works in this context as a libertarianism - that needs authority, for others. Absolute liberty is the fantasy of those subjected to (or wielding) absolute authority.

Victims are not that different from perpetrators. They have similar mentalities. People involved in oppressive of violent social relationships are damaged by them. Their reactions usually further entrench the damage.

Trying to love those who hate you is not the answer. Neither is speaking truth to power, which never works. Power always rigs the scene, because it sets the scene, in its favor. An oppressor able to control you will not stop until he gets your willing submission, with a compliant and contented attitude, or your destruction. There is no way with them that will work. The only way to think or talk about this is to speak "truly" about the violence, and not to the ones involving you in it.

Every true friend is someone you can fight with. Most such fights do not turn bloody. Every true enemy is someone you cannot fight with, as far as they are concerned, and so who must insist you regard them as a friend. Someone you must regard as friendly is a pure enemy. Hatred is pure, not ambiguous. Honest relationships include ambiguities. "The concession of politeness is always a political concession" (Pierre Bourdieu). A regime of total peace is an empire of absolute mastery and at least implicit and latent permanent war. A ruler who insists you must be peaceful is one who considers you a slave.

"Violence" to such rulers only means disobedience. A ruler or master who is a warrior is not concerned with his or her safety or well-being in any way but only with their power, and that means that the violence they fear is harm to their rule, ideology, interests, or empire.

Rage in contemporary society is largely produced by the alienating character of social relations mediated by the authoritarianism of bosses and fellows who demand compliance, and who typically have freedom to effectuate (enforce) their will because they are masters; and by the frustration people will feel when things they want or seem to need are thwarted by people whose wealth gives them power to walk away. And by social conditions that result from the systematic impoverishment of the environment many people live in.

Americans recently elected as president a candidate who channeled rage against a candidate who promised joy and was obviously enough wedded to the status quo of bureaucratic capitalism. The right claimed that the left-leaning (not actually leftist, but "progressive") educated elites had no alternative to a system lots of people hate but were trying to work within it. That is true. The right has no alternative to the system and doesn't want one, but it had an alternative to idealism: cynicism.

But cynicism is always the other face of idealism. The liberal Democrats are good cops; they will fuck you gently and it will be nasty in fact but it will be said to be beautiful. It will be done in the name of holy and happy ideals. The now far-right Republicans are bad cops; they will fuck people, maybe not you but someone else (that is their promise), and it will be absolutely violent, but what of that, because if you can just identify with the bastard fuckers, then who cares? Idealism gives way to cynicism; just look what happened in socialist countries.

Enforcing collective identities tends to make their participants and members more stupid. Personalities are not definable as identities are.

Some will call me a "hater." What that really means is that I am guilty of having strong opinions. The best way to be liked is to express none.

In America, if you say anything, to anyone, about anything, you take your life into your hands. It's very dangerous. The best way to live a long life if you want to be left in peace is to not care much about anything.

A crazy person is someone whose expressed thoughts are not ordered in the way that officious people expect.

But in an oligarchy virtue and vice cease to matter. "Post-truth" means the rule of pure authority in a state of exception. This means something like government by mafia organizations. But that is normal in capitalism. It has been that way for centuries, and nowhere more than in America.

The person in power always is right, speaks the truth, the essence of which is performative. A person not in power who speaks is always out of place, therefore wrong it what he says. If it is said "that is your opinion," this means it doesn't count, by someone whose opinions do. Might makes right: the sociology of knowledge works oppositely to its epistemology.

Trump's Republicans did not defeat the left. Where was the left? It wasn't involved in the election, except in so far as the Democratic Party needs its left-leaning faction. That faction failed. Trump's Republican Party defeated the pseudo-left. Rest in peace, pseudo-leftists, left-liberals, and progressives.

We on the left will not win a major national election, but we can be a force. We weren't much of one this time. That is our loss, and that of many people. Will the Democratic Party now move to the right or the left? I think what matters is the pressure its leaders and politicians feel from people well to its left. I remember going to university with progressives and am not sad they lost.