Forces At Work

Sporadic political outbursts, undercooked theory, and playlists. Most posts edited and re-edited a dozen times after publishing.

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  • The rationl and irrational

    I have no desire to uphold bourgeois ideals around personal mental health because I have been crazy on their terms my whole life and have been attacked by that same system the whole time. The rationality I will speak of in terms of social organization is my weapon against that system. I am not giving it up because some theory milieu says the underclass can’t break from liberal society and assert values against it, and must remain somehow illegible in all instances. Stressing values, in some limited sense, will be unavoidable. Being illegible to the system is no reward, and doesn’t help you escape their management.

    We have to assert a world against theirs, inverting the driving social logic of their society into something that gives that practical logic no quarter. We have to take up the questions implied by social life itself, for which liberals can only provide contradictory answers. Contrary to what some believe, liberal philosophy is not an all-knowing big Other, and did not pull all elements of society from thin air as a means of control. If liberals say friendship is important, that does not then make friendship a philosophical conspiracy. Liberals were forced to answer specific questions that were implied by a social organization that preceded them, and escaped them at many points.

    We are going to assert that every human should be fed and housed. We will assert that in practice, and we will devise a practice that does what it promises. That practice will be rational, even if it lets us off the hook individually to be something else. It is not important that we uphold some sanist standard as individuals. Rather, it is necessary for us to be able to trust that the total social body, in as much as it is consciously organized, will do the minimum of what is necessary while acting as that social body.

    We can be personally “irrational”, but that is currently only a question as a congruence of how society is organized, and because of power’s need to escape interrogation. We want a collective social endeavour to be predictable on certain terms. It is not incidental that it would be rational. It is functionally necessary for it to be so. The contradictions of human society thus far make that demand even more central. In application, this is not individuals conforming to any standard around mental health. They can be totally insane by liberal society’s current standards. All that maters is that we collectively do enough work to provide the minimum guarantees of life.

    The question of rationality matters in the total social product. That is also the case now, and was the case when bourgeois liberals went about philosophizing rationality, just in an inverse illusion: liberalism displaces this matter of the non-rational system onto individuals. When a liberal sweeps up homeless people off the street and sends them to psych wards, there is a definite question of a non-rational system being inverted into a matter of individual dysfunction by those liberals. The needs of those homeless people are inescapable because they are universal: they need food, shelter, and social care.

    The rational thing for the society to do would be to care for its citizens with the resources it definitely has. There is no way out but for us to cross the bridge that is rational social organization at the total social level, but especially when you start from the social contradictions we endure. It has nothing to do with “saving liberalism” from itself.

    In addressing the irrational social organization, we are doing away with the problem that made the matter of rationality so important to liberals in the first place. Their clinging to “rationality” is a neurotic reaction to a world that is no such thing. Yet the matter of rationality appears because of the misapprehension of the social totality. It lingers until you resolve the central conflict that keeps giving it shape, and that does necessarily come down to social organization being stable and tethered to universal needs.

    We have a social system now that refuses self-acknowledgment, allowing it an escape route from serving universal needs. It exists, but refuses to admit that it does. Once it consciously exists, it must serve the needs that are universal, and impose no ideals in lieu of that. Humans should be free to be whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t transgress against universal basic needs. Liberal capitalist society is purely that transgression.

    Securing needs is exactly the way to open up an expansive realm of freedom where we may depart from one another in more interesting ways. Yet this new society doesn’t escape ideology, either. Practically, the communist society acts every day to help, where capitalism forces us to attack one another. Where competition lurks in the background of capitalism, we have something else entirely when the automatic movement of society is about feeding and caring for one another.

    Ideology comes out of that, but it would be a result of a stable embedded practice that built trust, that also would allow us to depart from one another, while always having our bonds reinforced in the background. Someone could claim to be a lover in capitalism while the real society forces them to kill. In communism, we could have people who claim to be scary monsters, who practice love in opposition to their self-image. The only semblance of rationality that matters is at the total social level. We can not get beyond that matter other than by going through it. We have to transform these conditions into something else, first knowing what they are.

  • Liberal recuperation, protest, violence, universalism

    In times of legitimate social anger, expressed instantaneously and spontaneously in reaction to events, we must carefully always assess the forces of liberal recuperation. The raw expression of events in the aftermath of injustice are always given a mediation by the system that encloses it within the liberal ideological imagination. Events are captured by liberals as law-abiding and peaceful on liberal terms, before protesting crowds demanding justice know which way they are going in securing it. They are immediately sprung into action, and soon they have liberals marching by their side, stealing their anger and regurgitating it back to them on terms that acknowledge it while boxing it into solutions. It becomes hard to tell in these moments where genuine anger starts and where liberal recuperation begins.

    “Resist” is even now one of these words that close off space, in terms of what can be thought by radicals. “Resist” as an ideological buzzword is a prison. The system’s liberal ideologues are stamping reality on terms favorable to them before anyone else develops the capacity to articulate what is transpiring. They steal unfolding events before anyone beyond them can narrativize around events in a way that broadens the future of the protest activity. Once liberals frame it in their ideological terms, suddenly the whole flow of events that preceded their intervention starts to feel as if it was hatched in a meeting at the Center for American Progress.

    About four months into George Floyd, we had Marxists and socdem leftists complaining that the riots themselves were somehow liberal in origin. Liberals have enough power to continually narrow the frame around events and redefine what is happening on their terms. We need activity that surpasses this liberal ability to absorb unfolding events into their ideological templates. Not just in the sense of “we need revolution”, but we need these events that are already guaranteed to happen to take on new dimensions.

    Our acts can’t be so small that liberals can write them off as irresponsible, and must still be so norm-breaking that liberals fail to understand how to capture them within their narratives. The actions must be big in away where liberals can neither deny them nor claim them. We need these exact demonstrations of power to break from their past incarnations as safely within bounds and become something else. They must appear as they always do, and then shock society by taking a different path.

    Something has to happen that a liberal can’t deny, but hat does not have to be machine guns firing. It does not have to be the revolution in and of itself, but we need to break down the protective liberal imagination, and before the fascists finish doing that on their terms. The protest activity cannot wait for others to decide what it is. It must speak something in its actions that go beyond the liberal imagination. The third precinct burning was exactly that, but liberals ultimately managed to win back space for themselves in the aftermath.

    Police violence was such a clear wrong in 2020, and was an exclamation point to a whole sequence of activity in the prior decade, that burning down a police station became justified in the broad public imagination immediately. Liberals were stunned into silence. The system immediately began trying to recuperate the anger, and it wasn’t until liberals developed the “outside agitator” narrative that they managed to wrestle back some sense that certain types of protest were out of bounds.

    Yet even in reestablishing terms in their favor, they only could dismiss destruction by saying a Boogaloo Boy or whoever was responsible. They still couldn’t outright suggest that the oppressed were out of line for burning down businesses. For a full month, liberal ideology around protest norms collapsed. We can find the breakdown of those norms again, but actions have to be sharp and speak to something latent in the public imagination, that liberals can’t acknowledge or address. You make what is anti-social from the liberal POV transform into something socially acceptable to the broad public and vice versa. Destruction carried out by the poor becomes morally justified per the terms of an unrealized form of society, and violence against the poor becomes a sign of what is properly anti-social. We must make it the highest crime that a system could deprive humans of what they need to survive and then sic the cops on them when they speak out.

    As long as there is class, concepts like “rational” and “anti-social” are unavoidable. They are byproducts of liberalism’s false universalism. Liberalism’s contradictions make the highlighting of morality inescapable. True universal guarantees around life would render such words like “rational” and “antisocial” largely inapplicable, but they will be necessary for as long as a movement from below asserts a standard opposite to theirs. We have to talk about the “rational” and the “anti-social” because liberalism cannot address class conflict. Their insistence that their achieved universalism marks dysfunction a product of individual failure, means that we must assert that such cases of individual pathology result in “irrationality” only as a byproduct of liberalism’s invisibilization of class.

    Someone’s pathology can’t cause them to become homeless in a society where housing is a right for all. We must find the modes of disruption and destruction that reverse the terms of liberal society. We can not take a post-modern approach of anti-universalism, because there is still a burning question around the universal, that provides a moral salience for the swift actions of the poor. We want a kind of destruction that latches on to the higher moral calling. The burning of third precinct proved, beyond whatever bourgeois polling data suggests, that there is a kind of attack on this society from its underclass that has moral leverage. That is what must be clarified, in theory and in action.

    We are stuck in a situation where the false universalism persists until we find the right means to shatter it and supplant it with a concretely determined universal, of assuring no one remains in hunger. There is no refusal of liberal universalism in theory that will mean anything. It is all masturbatory. The universalism of liberalism is in fact only a shadow of the real potential universal implied by the conditions of the poor. The materiality of that poverty is the source of the urgency for liberals in apprehending a universal in concept, as a shield. You think you refuse liberals when you refuse the universal, but really you deny the poor redress. When they are no longer “poor”, when such a word can no longer be applied to anyone in a way that seems logical, we will have achieved the universal in such a way that it no longer needs to be a source of conflict in theory.

  • Notes on “”voluntarism””

    On the left, people rarely use “voluntarism” as an attack on others in a responsible manner. What I think is a worthwhile political subjectivity will be hard to explain as something other than voluntaristic, without inviting an attack from determinists, or from Marxists who feel the correct plan has already been handed down from Lenin, Mao, or Kautsky. Our own actions can become meaningful when applied to collective projects, and a better sense of accomplishment comes on the other end of that. We give up the individualistic expression of power, dodge the relations of competition, and in turn procure a sense of accomplishment in shared political action. Where we now see the individual’s meaning as coming only at the expense of others, we turn to a new way of life that derives individual meaning, at baseline, through collaboration. That may open heretofore unknown areas of competition and individualism, but we root new forms of such expression in a collective attainment of freedom.

    In politics, we want that people should see their individual actions as meaningful and at the same time limited. Meaningful, in the sense of erasing the boundaries of atomized competition that forces them to think at odds with society. It must, in the same individual, limit the tendency towards competition, while freeing a boundless social individual in its place, who does not need regimented, competitive activity in order to find meaning. We turn individuals from facing inwards to outwards. Your move towards the collective action is most meaningful when the individualistic frame for reward has been dissolved. To think about what your lone action accomplishes on quantified terms would be a distraction from, and a misunderstanding of, the political task.

    Take, for example, people in Minneapolis right now fighting ICE. There are currently actions to root ICE out of the community and they involve large numbers of people. Surely, everyone in the action has a role that acquires a degree of specificity, but when the total action is relayed to the outside world, it does not express itself as an individualistic act, or one guided by a leader. It is a group giving voice to widespread anger, and representing a righteous current within society that aims to protect all life on universal terms. Even the thwarting of an ICE agent could be the demand for the creation of a border-less society that could not kill or harm anyone for their attachment to one piece of land or another. That would free individuals from ever being the ICE agent or being dominated by them.

    Everyone participating in these actions is surely energized. If they push ICE back, they will feel a sense of accomplishment. The individuals in this action were not “unscientific” or “too voluntaristic” to think their actions mattered. A goal can be accomplished without lone people getting singled out as heroes, and they can still walk away satisfied in their near-anonymous participation. Their individual ego is nestled within a proper social structure in this act, that attaches to something beyond the ego in single individuals, yet still defends the space of individual identity more thoroughly than the ideologically individualistic route. It is activity that secures the space where individuals can exist, where today’s space is premised on the endless competition and violence of individuals, that, connected to environmental destruction and weapons of war, threatens life for everybody.

    The undifferentiated conditions and uniformity of subjectivity that are taken for granted when some Marxists declare action voluntaristic is itself more an issue. It is possible for your direct actions, that you take as meaningful, to not immediately have a result, or even need one. It is possible your actions won’t lead to your individual acclaim, but that is perfectly fine. You do not have any proof that such actions are meaningful at first, at least through the schemes of quantification we are used to in capitalist society. But that first, seemingly rewardless step in struggle, untethered from exchange, can become meaningful, first, in the very fact of helping you escape such matters of quantification.

    We want, in political struggle, to challenge the direct, one-to-one causal relation to achieved outcome. We do not want such concern to mediate our actions, and so we should take up action from a point that de-links us from such concerns. We are not taking to politics to move up the ladder and acquire a social promotion, and we want to close off the space that utilizes such mediation. Our desired outcome develops from numerous people abandoning the sense of directly legible individual accomplishment and actually shutting off our egoistic self-censorship, that often demands directly quantifiable meaning, accomplishment, and reward in exchange for all our activity.

    Getting over this expectation of equal exchange and direct quantification of actions, to have people give themselves over to actions that are unbound to such relations, is difficult. Some determinists will become hysterical and read this is unscientific. If they do not have a legible reward for an action staring them in the face, they will reject what you’re saying as some kind of exotic anarchism. But an initial unquantified action can be an avowal of one’s power in a sensible capacity as an individual, but also a recognition of limitation simultaneously. Certain Marxists who are stuck in their ways will still call this volunteerism, as if somehow not living in a total state of subsumed spectacle is unscientific. The overbearing reality we endure that tells us that action doesn’t matter is not science, but is rather a concession to spectacle, and is a disavowal. The truth is that we are always in some way acting in the world, and our actions can be consequential when we truly believe we are passive.

    It is not the easiest thing to explain the benefit of this kind of subjectivity, while also stressing that it should center around non-individualized reward. I think even for an individual, it can become empowering to silence that part of your psyche. Taking action in this manner frees you from commodified relations and likewise pulls you into the relation that can overcome capital’s demands. We dissolve capital through the shared action of securing each other’s subsistence. This doesn’t mean all activity has to become blind. Grounded in new collective endeavors, we can redirect each other towards personal strengths.

    The cult formation of this kind of process is something to be leery of, obviously. We cannot permit a guru or leader who tells us to shut off our individualism for the sake of the group. Especially not when that group is itself still dominated by a hierarchical form, with a patriarchal ego acting as its head and heart. The trick will be to turn off our individualism in groups in order to then lay down a foundation of care that can in return sustain limitless individual expression. Still, it means something now to find other people and begin to act in groups, without knowing precisely what the end goal will be. You are not more scientific if you refuse to act, hunkering down to wait for New Mao to descend from heaven and lead the masses. Nor are you more scientific to decide that you and a handful of your friends already came up with the plan for revolution, and you’re just waiting for the right time to strike, where the masses will finally be receptive to your idea of replacing the constitution with a new constitution.

    Communism itself does not permit you to constantly play Goldilocks and present yourself as more sensible when compared against determinists and voluntarists. The communist objective will often force your hand and make you act in ways that don’t fall directly into some reasonable centrist’s posture. Communist avowal might cause you to appear sensible one moment, and like an alien to other people the next. A further problem at play here is the sense of communism being taken a future object. When communizers, for example, bring the matter of communism to the lived present, the deterministic Marxist will think in terms of completed objectives and balk at the idea that you can snap your figures and achieve communism in its total quantification in just a mere moment. Yet what the communizer is attempting to focus on is a change in the quality of our relations, that eschews the idea that the long term object is only a heavenly one, that must at all times separate itself from our action.

    We are not attempting to quantify all matters of communism as accomplished in one fell swoop, but are trying to change the way we relate to social experiences that unfold through time and can not be felt tangibly in any moment in total. To participate in a path towards any given communist objective must also become communism itself, and must abide by a new relational logic in order to meaningfully develop communism at all. The communizers are trying to bridge the present to the future, where the deterministic Marxist is permanently split in the present from that future because of their inability to see communism in multiple dimensions, unfolding in space and time. They can only say “you’re crazy to call this communism because from what I can tell, the static end state of communism is not totally visible.”

    When in fact, once we start down this road, we are attempting to suspend life being mediated by the neatly cleaved future goal that steals our existence from us. The future goal goes from being a mediating force outside experience to one inside of it. For it to be inside, means its logic must govern our relations, regardless of what we have accomplished. Otherwise, as mediation, it becomes religion, that likewise must make existence something other than heaven. Instead, we can be on the path to accomplishing this or that aspect of communism, but take more seriously the way we relate in doing such a thing. The deterministic Marxist does not have a scheme for this that cans scientifically quantify it, but it is the most central aspect.

    These kinds of fantasies in relation to communism negatively condition us in the present, whenever we refuse participating in struggle because we have no sense that it will achieve anything that can be seen as a reward to the individual ego. The supposedly lofty “theoretical” idea of transcending the expectation of future transcendence and orienting social and political meaning in a current moment, is exactly our immediate task of finding other people in struggle against ICE and Trump, and dedicating ourselves to collective action on those issues, without guarantees. The trick of the political masters moving meaning from the present to the future goal is always born out of us not being permitted power, either by capitalist reality, or by the “anti-capitalist” forces that nonetheless become terrified of masses leading themselves. We cannot be granted the power from without, and we can not earn it from a training program. We must must take that power.

  • “You”

    There is so often an attempt, usually by liberals in opposition to Trump, to present a uniform subject in society that is being duped by reaction. They will tell you that Trump attacking immigrants is him duping this pre-given subject, who starts from a blank slate of interest before Trump arrives. Dupery is a near constant aspect of capitalism, surely, but there is no pre-given uniform social subjectivity that Trump or any other fascist aims at deceiving from some blank slate. They are never not appealing to embedded power relations.

    There is a class divide, and in this divide there are coalitions that are pushed to either side of it. Attacking “illegal” immigrants is an appeal to one coalition, against another. There is no pre-given universal subject. Trump is bringing forth a latent investment of one part of society, if not exploiting an outright conscious one. What we can say is that these people are being pulled into Trump’s coalition through their desire and investment in status, even if we could say there is a “dupery” in losing out on an alternative prospect. Yet no liberal can offer this alternative, and so they do not have the space to speak of dupery. What it would take for there to be an alternative is a collective power with the willingness to fight for it, and all consolation prizes are accepted in lieu of such a collective power appearing. There is no sense to a reaction in that situation beyond opting for the consolation prize, and yet it only can be shown to be consolation in the face of collective power appearing. Just the suggestion of a potential power is not enough. It has to demonstrate itself in some way that can break through capitalism’s ideological sense of inevitability.

    We must acknowledge the split in subjectivity that cuts through class, into reproductive coalitions based around social hierarchies. We want to amplify this divide, in making it obvious. We bring people to our side in setting about a new world that can eliminate such divides concretely. These social hierarchies are reified into static subjectivities that align with our enemy’s order, but the truth is always that they can become de-reified and rendered without prior boundaries. That insistence on a static nature is always on the side of power, but always false in the last instance. We want to acknowledge the parameters of these subjectivities in order to dissolve them. Even more, we aim to push people to our side in becoming subjects of the total social task, so we can dissolve these antagonisms through the securement of life and its necessities for all.

    Our subjective focus must acknowledge the class divide and its associated coalitions. We can not presume we have everyone on our side, but we must find a way that every reified subject in capitalism could hypothetically dissolve their interest into our social task. Our enemies can never propose what we propose, because they must maintain hierarchies at all times. We can not pretend to be inclusive of everyone on capital’s terms of identity, but we can create the space where every class antagonism could melt away.

    Capital melts all that is solid behind the subject’s back, while re-substantializing the boundaries of identity that can be gripped like an object by the automatic subject of capital. Capital will force this process for all, as it eats away at the conditions that prop up any individualistic sense of identity, and it will steer people into the new parameters needed for its continued domination of social life. Reversing this is to present the “automatic subject” as humanity’s unconscious, and to open up the path where we could dissolve and re-substantialize our own boundaries, while given to a conscious social task..

    We must clarify the social task and bring people to it, and that starts by acknowledging the static categories of capitalism to be dissolvable, even if they are often materially grounded. There is no pre-given universal subject at play. We can appeal to conscious interest among many, on the one hand, and latent, unspoken, unclaimed interest, on the other. We must see all subjects, on our side or against us, as divided, and capable of being pushed in opposed directions, depending on material circumstances.

    We should see opposed identities under capital as dissolvable. People on our side need the help of the social collective to remain strong and grounded in the overall task. Nothing can be taken for granted as the natural state for any subject, because conditions are always sneaking up behind us to counter, or remold, our desire for static identity. Many we think are allies can be lost to our enemies. There is no perfect and static roles for self and other in any of this. There is just the refinement of the total social task that would stop embedding our sense of identity in the conditions of class, that all rely on forced deprivation. Overturning this forced deprivation is overturning class, capital, and every other malignant social hierarchy.

  • Hell is other communists ☹️

    I have been a communist for a decade. Others have been around longer, and I even came to it late in life. But it has been enough time to become disillusioned that the worst resistance I get for being a communist is actually from middle-class people who fancy themselves communists in a limited but moralistic way. The usual move among these moralizers will be to demand that we think of people generally as being non-radical in some kind of way that is insurmountable. The communists are only supposed to be in a little book club together. The only way being in that club matters is if we refuse the outside world.

    Which would be fine, if that starting premise was refusing the assertion of the relations that precede us in the world. It would be fine if we aimed at changing those relations, but the importance of exclusivity and novelty is asserted for the opposite reason by these moralizers. When it comes time to think about how to escape our situation, we’re supposed to say, “these fucking pig masses deserve to suffer. They aren’t worth our time. We did our work and they failed fulfilling their obligations. We must refuse them on absolute terms.” As if this could ever be more than some melodramatic reaction stemming from their own neurosis and resentment. Sure, never investigate the fact that your own relationship to theory, which is supposed to be about changing the world, has made you miserable, resentful, and passive.

    Social democrats are ridiculous when they suggest an absolute goodness at the core of the worker. But the flippant response by the moralizers, where they suggest that the average poor and working class person chose this world in a conscious, deliberate way, when they are more so victims of it, is a disgusting, but also plainly unhelpful, way to think about the situation. The fact that it is always people from the upper class who present this as the case, so they can refuse solidarity with poor people, gets a little old!

    They will selectively use abstractions in a reactionary manner. They will refuse such abstractions when they’re doing a fun little intellectual exercise defending Foucault or Deleuze, but then have no problem filing even billions of people away as disposable through the use of abstractions. They will always protect the great master Foucault from being assaulted by abstractions, and they salivate through abstractions when thinking about how much people deserve to suffer generally. They will find a spoiling essence of human nature when they need to, even if they otherwise avow an understanding of the impossibility of such a fixed essence.

    The question of politics is pressed on them, however, in a way that it isn’t to just anybody else. Politics were pressed on them in implication through their very relationship with theory, and they repressed that in order to maintain an aesthetic, libidinal, individualistic relationship with academic pursuits. Maybe they feared those pursuits might be spoiled by practice. At any point where reality presses them to think of theory in active, practical, social terms, they refuse, and they hunt for scapegoats to help explain why it would be foolish to subject themselves to any demands of political solidarity.

    “The world is this way because people don’t read” they will tell themselves. Except they’re supposed to be reading to figure out how to intervene in the world, where most people go without that form of political education. Really, more than education, it is space to reflect that aids change. The moralizers are the ones with the resources and the time to read, and they will tell you with a straight face their refusal is the fault of some abstract, totalized, immoral entity, who isn’t smart enough to value revolution, and is encompassing of the whole society in some fixed sense.

    But then a) they still want the label communist for some reason and b) when the masses don’t act, they’re like “look, I told you. The pig masses all need to be destroyed! We must let the masses die as a punishment for consciously choosing this exact state of affairs!” But these theory fandom types are implicated in the problem and had it pressed on them that they should act, and they have opted for an aesthetic relation instead. The question the theory poses to them continues, even if they only want theory to be a fun aesthetic hobby. I don’t think they should now die in a cleansing fire because of their choice, but if ghettoized populations in the US have to take blame for “consenting” to America while they’re getting their heads kicked in, I’m not sure why the moralizers escape implication just because they read the right theory. As if both they and the masses were assigned a group project around theory in a class they were both taking, and the irresponsible masses just refused to do their homework.

    A reaction from the “masses” is missing in the US like it is missing elsewhere and has always been missing, except for fleeting revolutionary flashes. In understanding this reality, the moralizers are more on the hook than people in the US who grow up in project housing and endure violent conditions. The country itself is designed to lead millions of people to prison slavery. To trap a few million in prison slavery, it has to subject hundreds of millions to conditions that lead people to crime. The moralizer does not have a right to lump these people in with the very class that is dominating them, in order to render them a single abstract scapegoat figure they can offload their anxiety onto. If they picked apart the abstractions and discovered their contradictions, they would again be pressed to act. The actual hard thought about prevailing conditions would reveal a humanity in the very figures they want to render as disposable refuse.

    There’s also the small matter that the ruling power disguised by these cheap abstractions has all the power to doom the entire planet, included those trapped by their system in the US and beyond. There is no shared class project between pedophilic sex traffickers and prison slaves, nor any of the millions who just barely escaped becoming prison slaves. It’s also an impotent gesture to wish death on an abstraction. It’s merely another way to avoid responsibility. Still, the theory fans are more responsible than those who grows up in conditions that were leading or led them to prison slavery.

    It doesn’t have to be oppression olympics, but the abstractions conceal reality to give the person making them leeway to refuse acting. Their insistence on the social other’s blame is pretty obviously them trying to dodge how they feel about their own culpability. That people attempt to conceal this reality while demanding everyone treat them like they’re renegades is grotesque. They should not be suspended in some guilty state forever due to this failure, and no one needs their self-flagellation. But at some point it should become transparent that they don’t really have the space to evade blame while blaming.

    There is barely a left in the US. Any given left in history was inadequate to the task of ending capitalism. The task of revolution does not just appear to all. Just because the theory fan had the question pressed on them reading theory does not make the same question appear for others. There are endless hurdles in the way, most of all that brutal social reproduction does not ever relent. You are forced back into it every day before you get any space to think. To act like this isn’t the case everywhere on earth is a lie, and the only people who believe it are rich people who want to excuse themselves due to supposed insurmountable ignorance among “the masses.” That is the kind of degraded thinking that you would hope someone reading nothing but philosophy all day long would be able to avoid! There is no place in history where it could be taken for granted that we’d secure the defeat of capitalism. I do not think the theory fans are on the hook for our collective failure. I think, deep down, they do think that, though, and they’re trying to run from addressing it. Meanwhile, as long as they refuse addressing their own relationship to struggle, they will continue to blame some abstract entity and impotently try to condemn it to death. What this does is force us all back to a state of atomization and distrust, and gives the right-wing space to dominate.

    Yet my point here as always remains that we must intervene, precisely to end the state of affairs that subjects poor Americans to degradation and even more assaults the international working class. The US working-class is not politically forged and is thus not acting, and my responsibility is to help make the situation clear to as many people as possible, and demand they act with me. Nobody has a static essence. Everyone is a product of their conditions. We are trying to foment political struggle among workers who globally exist in very different environments, and yet all these fractions of workers face the inevitability of the class relation nonetheless. Nothing can be taken for granted. The fact that nobody is acting is your cue to act, not an excuse for you to do nothing and scapegoat. I think it’s fair to say you have even less excuse if you have the free time to read political theory all day long.

    But anyway, hell should be other communists, because “communists” are a thing that should not exist. I say that because I avow the necessity of communism coming into existence as a movement and ultimately erasing the conditions that force us to speak its name. It only must be named because of the reified state of capitalism. Capitalism asserts itself as eternal, so we must name what dissolves that lie. Please, become a communist, so we can abolish communists.

  • “The Future of Psychoanalysis”, Gabriel Tupinambá

  • “Where Do Martyrs Go: The Fugitive Vanguard”, Abdaljawad Omar

  • Revolutionary cowardice

    I don’t know why I have to care if Adorno was passive in terms of revolutionary conflict. Sure, he was, yes, and so were many others who have contributed to our collective political understanding. I take what I can from these people and I move on. If there are contradictions in their work, I address those. There is no use in talking about Adorno’s pacifism if it’s a means to toss out work that is perfectly up to the task of at least partially helping us understand our current situation. I don’t care about the character features of the person who wrote it! Sometimes writers are cowards!

    Yet the fact of their writing being an aid to our moment saves them! These sad, passive, academic loafs, in the end, contributed! I don’t need to have seen them get medals of honor from the USSR or China to know they’ve contributed!

    “Adorno betrayed us by not picking up a gun. Therefore, I will take all the work I have read by him and decide to find it unhelpful, even though I know for a fact it is helpful. I will decidedly live in an upside-down fantasy land so I can get back at Adorno for not doing a mass shooting. He should have worked out and built muscle mass. He should have flexed his big strong biceps at everyone, and also should have picked up a machine gun and started shooting like Rambo. Instead, he only committed himself to worthless pursuits. Like theory. Ugh.”

    I swear to you that if you dis-invest in individualism entirely, it stops being a concern that Adorno did not live up to a violent revolutionary ideal, considering what he produced, and where that work ties to our current project. The ones who claim and demand the supposed selflessness of the violent revolutionary image are speaking with the master’s tongue, and are the most ensnared by patriarchal and capitalist notions of the individualism. That capitalism is contradictory, and has multiple expressions of the individual, does not change the fact that one such kind is stripping the ego of content beyond the glory of sacrificing itself on individualistic terms, before ever having the chance to shatter these limits altogether.

    You can learn to appreciate even Adorno’s minuscule contributions when you stop imposing the ego’s form on top of every expression of social life you find in the world. Military selflessness is the ego stripped to its raw foundation. It is the ego stripped of all content, throwing itself into a volcano, committed to a refusal of the idea that life could be a value in and of itself, beyond subordination to pregiven terms of meaning. It is the raw grip power has on human life. It is the rawest expression of such power, that it conditions all human life to limit itself to a having its existence coded by such determinations. Power owns that form of life. Traversing such an individualistic frame of meaning is the only way to take that power away from this social order, on new terms that must be one’s own personally devised but socially instantiated symbolic purpose. The shared path through the limits of individualism must necessarily become a collective traversal of this form of subjectivity. We can persuade or agitate towards this, if not maneuver and push the conditions of our existence towards breaking down the material grounding of reified subjectivity, to clarify the better path.

    It is convenient for the world’s powers that we are stuck with this manner of interpreting our existence, even down to notions of self-sacrifice. When all meaningful content of our individual life is blotted out, we still abide by this structure. We only think of what we can individually do, which usually amounts to sacrificing our very life for the continued benefit of our rulers and the system they rely on. Communism is not a form of rule that negates life, but only from the future. It traverses the individuated form that pushes “self” sacrifice, establishing new terms for social life altogether that no longer confine you numerically as a workable parcel of energy in the hands of power.

    It should no longer be the case that 1+1+1+1+1 = 5 individuals who are thrown into the volcano. It should instead be a matter first of our task, then of the consciousness required for that task, and then finally, the hands needed to mold conditions in pursuit of that task, whether 5 or 5 billion. If revolutionary heroism is to retreat to counting yourself as “1” and then restraining your social contribution within the boundaries of a given individuated limitation, then we should be revolutionary cowards in the gaze of this demand. Dissolve your sense of “1” in the face of it. There is life beyond it.

  • Is the CIA behind this post?

    The paranoid structure of thought on the left that sees the CIA behind every antagonism is also a mind steeling itself against critical reflection. This kind of paranoid reasoning will be used to undermine every attempt on the left to become self-critical. All the paranoia is in service of propping up identity. That is, a sectarian communist identity, grounded in a historical power, that stabilizes sectarian life in the present, but is now detached from real social conditions and isolated into cults.

    This is a force that will constantly inject itself in and work to forestall every left attempt to adapt to conditions. It will have the signifiers of past revolution on its side, but will act in defense of prevailing forms of ideological power. This blindly-formed split in its subjectivity means it will not be able to interact honestly. It will continually attack the left and do so through paranoid reasoning, while attempting to claim the mantle of the left leadership, but only enough to browbeat its opponents into submission. It will gain no ground in the world beyond left sectarianism through its victory against critical theory. It doesn’t realize this intervention by critical theory is the path it has to cross to regain a footing in the outside world.

    The sectarians will never address theoretical concerns in any of this, as it is just as much protecting itself from the interrogation of theory as it is trying to assert its own dominance. It can not actually bring itself to analyze or question its political history. It will only use character assassination against its critics in order to dodge the arguments they have brought forth. You could call this “character assassination”, too, that I would making such claims about sectarians, if not for the fact that the critical theory, in the first place, substantively addresses the politics of the sectarians. These sectarians are refusing to address the critique, and can only insist that the CIA or some other nefarious force produced it, and is solely responsible for any seeming contradiction among leftists. This defense itself is so curious and transparently maladaptive that we have no choice but to ask ourselves why it resists interrogation so fiercely.

    Then, it is the case that the total Marxist and communist critique must find a way to assess “superstructural” matters that cut beyond reified appearance. There are relations that can not so totally be summed up through analysis of economic data. We have to interrogate how “material” reality shows itself in our behavior and in our thinking. A critical analysis of our thinking can be a path back to what materially grounds us. We can trace what our left formations do, through their professed ideology and thinking, back to the “base”, if only when such a maladaptive pattern erupts and clearly acts as a roadblock to advancing within and against society. This is not a totalized account of how capitalism absolutely conditions all thought in society in an entirely predicable way, but is selectively directed to where things have gone awry, and in that case is only theory creating a bridge towards new practice.

    How I respond here is how I believe theory demands we respond generally. More so, I think it highlights what we need to consider in our social relations, which is the way the dominant society’s modes of power and ideology infect attempts at liberation. This necessarily happens unconsciously. We are reproducing this society and have to reflect to understand why we would alter practice. We are not doing this to advance theory in the university, but figuring out how to make theory stick in practice. That we will always adopt new disadvantageous behavior is nothing to fear, as the aim of communism itself is to make this kind of interrogation a permanent feature of life.

    It is not the CIA doing causing us to misapprehend, but is rather an inevitable aspect of organizing within a capitalist system. The sectarians are not in error because they’re intrinsically evil, but because they reflexively seek to entrench this society’s modes of relations into spaces that are attempting to break from them. They assert these modes of relations on dishonest terms, always as they rely on the “realist” assertions of prevailing power in appealing to inevitability. They insist that we stop critically interrogating the modes of organizing they bring forth and just let the leadership handle our business. That this very relation is how dominant power sneaks in the backdoor, through our lack of self-reflection creating a blind spot, is a point that is impossible to get across to the sectarian.

    A hardened fetish-form of organization, conducive to capitalist, class, and patriarchal relations, that does not accurately reproduce in consciousness its real internal social dynamics, has cemented itself as the most visible symbol of attack against the system. It is now more so our greatest stumbling block. The outside world has already been inoculated against it, so this now is only an internal struggle among leftists. The point of critical intervention is to figure out how to return to the world and bypass the system’s immunization. That Marxism can’t perfectly analyze these conditions is irrelevant, but that pervasive certainty is also a part of the kind of thinking that we must attack. There are no perfect solutions. Marxism must be on the side of contemplating its own errors, and not ceding to the idea that master experts can protect us from social dissonance. This acceptance is likewise the path to growth. Better to have a society of people struggling for answers together, than to have one assured and quieted to the need for struggle by father figures, who only demonstrate mastery through fetishistic illusions that necessarily disguises social reality.

  • Did Adorno destroy communism?

    Adorno did in fact speak of the pathology within certain expression of Communist practice, particularly in its Stalinist variants. Did these claims in fact destroy communism as a movement, or was Adorno actually describing a “Communism” that was in the process of eating itself? What we know, unless you are invested in conspiracy theories, is that Adorno made all of these claims as a communist who was concerned with communism. Just as people are doing now against Gabriel Ropckhill and his supporters, who have launched a crusade against Adorno. I am sorry to say that those on that side of the debate have precluded communism through their demands of a specific kind of practice. Their conformation with Adorno is this fact attempting to reveal itself.

    Adorno shows quite adeptly how even a communist can speak against “Communists”. An understanding of what communism requires leads you in that direction, inevitably, when confronted with the historical expressions of the communist movement. Ye the many examples of Adorno picking apart the psychology of authoritarianism does not affirm Rockhill’s claims about Adorno’s “anti-communism.” That one can’t admit that communism itself isn’t wholly contained by those now-dead Communist projects, and feels pressured to depict those projects as non-contradictory, is where confusion starts. No one has ever been obligated to refuse being critical. The demand to silence that process of self-criticism, and refuse it expanding across the entirety of the socialist world, is more to blame for why those projects collapsed. Adorno is a scapegoat for that, simply because he so accurately described it.

    Now that these parties are dead, gone, and can’t be resuscitated, means it is probably time to permit criticism of their methods, especially as criticism had no bearing on their downfall, at all. The USSR did not fall because Adorno observed its contradictions. For the sake of the communist movement itself, we have to finally give an account of the failure, and stop playing dress up, dragging around the corpse of dead movements. A demand that no one ever be critical as a precondition for social formation is a part of why we are stuck. Nothing “Communists” offer society now could escape ruthless criticism. That it refuses facing judgment is why no momentum can be established, but any new momentum will have indeed killed off most of these forms of action.

    The illusion that parties “accomplished socialism” and “won” in the past would make no difference, even if it were true. What matters is that you are abiding by those older rules and they are not helping you establish a communist practice broadly across society in the current moment. It hasn’t just been a few years of effort, where you could write off failure as just a matter of capitalism’s strength. It has now been nearly a century of these kinds of party formations failing in the US, and they aren’t proving themeless resilient to capitalism elsewhere. It is not simply a matter of leftists not taking the advice of MLs. What MLs want, generally, across their many expressions, is to implement what will functionally be a weight around the neck of social movements. Those in struggle now rightly refuse the kind of abuse that has been modeled in these formations for years, and the organizational structures are just not nimble enough to reach the collective capacities that revolution will require. What MLs see as efficient and streamlined is exactly the opposite, as it denies meaningful conscious expression to all. The orgs become a lifeless body that the leaders must drag around, and slowly that body becomes a rotten, festering corpse. It feels streamlined because no one is permitted meaningful expression. Communists and Marxists must adapt, or they will die under this model.

    The problem is that when Adorno talks about things like “personality structure” in relation to authoritarianism, he is talking about the very people who call the Frankfurt School a CIA op. I don’t know what you do about that, but don’t be surprised when “comradely” appeals among these people get you nowhere. They want that simply affixing the label “communist” on a massive society somehow renders any pathological personality structure non-existent. Yet it is their exact manner or organization that fixes this pathological structure in place. The ML mode of revolution is to attempt to use revolutionary struggle as a means of tethering everyone to a group ego. As we have not transcended capitalist society, this amounts to tethering everyone to a pathologically capitalist ego. It should be no surprise why many of the communist experiments had totalized environments that rendered their societies into something akin to factories. The revolutionary practice we take up under capitalism must not mimic its structures, but should permit all social individuals to become more than “one.” Their “individual” identity must be given a new kind of container, that permits depth. This is what would transcend both of capitalism’s “individual” and “collective” individual poles. The communist practice must attempt to secure life for all without question, so this universally sustained life can give birth to unlimited new social expression.

    The traditional “Communist” refuses this attempt to rethink evolutionary subjectivity, as if communists, demanding all members of society take reasonability for their relations, wouldn’t want to face down the problems of this personality structure. The “Communist” double down, calls theoretical interrogation a CIA plot, and only demands further that we break society into fetishistic divisions and groupings. Any countering opinion is labeled postmodern CIA Frankfurt School devil magic, even though the roots of this theory all resides in Marx. No, that structure supposedly becomes non-existent when society is given the right label, and the right group of people are put in charge. Such an idea tells you everything you need to know about the Rockhill crusaders, and clues you in on what they find so frightening about Adorno. They are the actual obstacle to the very project they have built their identity around.

    To escape capitalism, we must face how it pathologizes us, and we must use forms of organization that act against these effects, and free us from them. We can no longer do what the Stalinists demand, which is double down on the fetishistic, pathological formations, given over to ideological appeals around necessity. These appeals are capitalism in disguise, luring us into a trap. The “Communists” throw on their uniforms and conceal themselves through aesthetics, because in plain presentation you might see them for what they are. The “Communists” of the fetish-form dress themselves up to fool you into thinking they have something to offer.

    They only have an appeal to what is. There’s nothing substantive beyond an initial appeal that you kneel to inevitability, based on what they say is an omnipresent truth, but is just capitalist ideology in a disguised form asserting its necessary divisions of labor and politics. Communism as a movement starts with forms of organization that negate capitalist ideology about “necessary” structure. Under no circumstances do we have to be “realists” about such forms and give in to the “necessity” of letting them rule over us. They must be shattered at the start. The adaptable forms of social mediation under communism take a conscious form, passing over from capitalism’s reified forms through a hammer blow. We must shatter the reified forms of capital, only to lay a new foundation from which to navigate society. This new mediation must itself aspire to secure life for all, and must give all involved say over our shared project. We must all be allowed to be the motion that carries communism from the future into the present.

  • Labels

    Capitalism’s conditions seduce us into labels, that then become a grounding that fixes us in belief beyond any point we could reasonably say is advantageous. It becomes advantageous on capital’s terms of zero-sum conflict, but these must always erode the social. Unconsciously, and in opposition, we deposit the failures of identity into the social other in this process, in order to dispose of our undesirable traits, and avoid dissonance. The rules of psychic interaction say that our image must be legible and non-contradictory, which is always more an unconscious compulsion than anything we consciously affirm.

    We are driven to make the other into an object that we can eradicate. The more rigid and permanent we desire our position within a label to be, the more static and opaque the other must become to conceal what we project and hide from in ourselves. That we address the other in this social field of individualistic meaning guarantees that we will follow our image into conflict. Of course, capitalism structures our lives on these terms, apart from anything we decide to address on our own. We are always pulled back into self-image. Paradoxically, it is often a result of the other raising self-reference through the use of “I”, preceding self-description. We are driven straight back into ourselves through the other presenting their own fixed boundaries of identity.

    Yet, the social environment forces us to preemptively defend ourselves on terms of identity, and we are wise not to try to escape those terms. We can’t lose track of what our identities mean in our environment, for our own safety. Even our attempt to be free of our identity can assert it in the eyes of others. They may see your freedom from identity as an assertion of it. The image they understand you through may demand a certain, opposite form of self-denial, or else your refusal to bow your head insults what they feel should constitute identity, on their own ideological terms. For you, denial of ego is freedom, and likewise asserts you as an identity contra anyone who feels you should hang your head. They need to see you suffer through self-aware self-persecution, which renders you as voided of self in their eyes. This is what is demanded by their attempt at self-esteem.

    It would be nice if simply having good morals could save of us from this predicament, but communists, too, fall victim to such social dynamics. Communists are driven to destroy each other. The less we posit our needs into abstract ideals, and wield those ideals against each other, the better off we are. We do not need to use ideals to beat people into good morals. The presentation of ideals and morality should not close itself off in an individualistic loop. Claims about morals and ideals should be presented like a bridge for us to cross into shared practice. How do we honor ideals together? What we think of as ideals are activities that we must make speak in social reproduction. Our inactivity communicates a demand for ideals. Our activity would speak those ideals and allow us to dissolve rivalry.

    If ideals speak in practice, they ease the sense of competition, as these ideals in practice, for communists, are about mutual interdependence. “Communists” do not need to have a country, or even an official org, to back self-identity, but they should seek a practice, even if practice is broader than ideologues would like to admit. We must develop the practice that can give us an escape from our hovering ideals, through action. If some social other doesn’t conform to what you see as an ideal, figure out how to bridge their practice with yours. How do you include them in your self-understanding, instead of using them as foil, that you ultimately project your negative features into? You can avoid competing with them, or demanding everyone focus on what you possess and they lack. We are never just our static self-image. Alongside our self-image is always the social other. Do we incorporate that other into our larger sense of self, or do we refuse them, only to have them haunt what we think is our clean self-image?

    We can figure out how to lose that sense of competitive accomplishment. We can dissolve the figure of a rival “nonparticipant” through action. How do you figure out how to act in concert, so neither you or this social other are opposed through individualistic identity? How do you close off the paths of individualistic pursuit on both ends, to move towards each other in a space of reconciliation, where neither are forced to obey the laws of competition?

  • Fulfillment in education

    People suggest philosophers are impenetrable because, in their own situations, that is true. Adorno was absolutely impenetrable to me when I tried to read in my 20s. Waving your finger at me and telling me I was morally failing in my duty to read Adorno would not have helped the situation! Thank god no one did, because I may have developed a blood feud against them, that would have caused me to swear off Adorno for the rest of my life. Lucky that I escaped such feigned concern from others on that specific front. I was permitted to build up the capacity to understand theory at my own pace. It took time.

    People are prepared from very early life to be able to work their way towards understanding more complicated material, but they take this a classed, and thus unevenly permitted, preparation for granted. They do not even see it as preparation, but as a universally afforded premise. Still, they, too, are driven to have resentments around even what was afforded to them. Although we also have people who overcome obstacles, but remain bitter, just in the wrong direction, against those from their background who seemingly failed to put in effort.

    Society tells them their achievements should have fulfilled them. When confronted by the other’s envy, they distract themselves from that lack of fulfillment to tell the other, “you should have worked harder, I don’t care about your plight.” That serves as a defense against the realization that pursuing life on society’s terms, without a chance to define their own principles on struggled-over terms, left them miserable, even in their achievements.

    For both the advantaged and disadvantaged person, fulfillment would be better found through the social relation between them, that both reject in order to double down on individualistic social competition. Both cling to individualistic image and achievement, in competition, and out of pride, which then causes them to refuse the other, and thus refuse what is “other” in oneself.

    It is a route towards sharpening self-image like a blade, but one with no handle, that slices through your palm as you drive it into the other’s neck.

  • We’re bringing back idpol

    Not to do dreaded “identity politics” but it does tend to be cis straight white men who think they’ve found a place above society to consider its conflicts and treat all positions equally, racist and non-racist alike. I don’t think I’m imagining this. I’d just ask why it’s always the straight cis white guys who have this incredible capacity to be emotionless in the face of social conflict, while considering all sides equally? Is it their genetics? Or perhaps, maybe they have an insensitivity to what their own power is doing in the world, that blinds them to the fact that racist and non-racist opinion can’t be considered as equally worthy of consideration?

    I just know that the same cis white guy is totally calm and scientific-minded until you find a way to implicate them as white in a white supremacist society. Then they become as hysterical as the caricature of the person they try to talk down to, who supposedly cedes too quickly to emotion. As long as you never bring up whiteness, they can comport themselves with an impressive amount of calmness and civility. They can remain wise gurus through all kinds of confrontation. Five seconds into bringing up whiteness, suddenly they have lost the science behind levelheadedness.

    What I will assert is that so, too, can everyone else become wise gurus in the face of struggle, when the environment itself is not stressing the relations of domination in a concealed way. The straight cis white guy’s levelheadedness comes as his whiteness is naturalized as a dominant standpoint, and that fact is made invisible. The problem is that this calmness becomes a weapon of whiteness against those it seeks to subjugate. What would bring us all to the less hysterical position would be to acknowledge the conditions of our environment that frame our interactions. We cannot just start from the premise that we have been made equal already. We have to center all attempts to equalize in the reality that the environment itself is classed and racialized.

    Of course, many people in the past have realized these issues, theorized about them, and have been refused by white Marxists as “liberals.” In their mind “liberal” means “sensitive woman.” That is generally how social conservatives approach these issues as well. Oddly enough, conservatism is itself a kind of liberalism, as is social democracy. The people who are trying to work through difficulties in organizing are often people who want to overthrow society. Throwing around the word liberal in this case is not very helpful, but I digress. All of what I’m saying can and should be incorporated into Marxist and communist struggle, but time will tell how many times we need to go over the same problems. They keep returning because we have not figured out how to move past them. The problem for white Marxists is that what they refuse as “idpol” are the exact blueprints that will lead us to overcoming this discourse about identity altogether. Yet for some reason they have a lot of pride in their bold, stoic determination being what forces class for itself relations to come into existence. Wonder what that’s about.

  • sloptalk

    There is a competitive animosity, inescapably classed, that is shot through discourse around “slop” and cultural degradation. Harder, still, is the fact that we are obviously enduring a kind of widespread social degradation, concurrent with, and certainly not unrelated to, a rise in global fascism. I only hope at some point that people realize that capitalism itself frames all of these matters of culture and aesthetics as competitive activities, and that both the anti-intellectual and “pretentious” aesthete are responding to one another through the prism of competitive, classed relations. I know well from being poor that relationships with aesthetics or education feel classed. They become classed, certainly. Society frames these aspects of life to you when you’re poor in such a way where you’ll want to refuse their content based purely on how it seems to be a weapon used against you.

    When the wealthier person has access to art, education, or any culturally refined activity, it feels like it was a weapon designed for them. Is this the truth? Well, no, but the poor person isn’t mistaken about how society is structured, either. At that moment, it may be a functional truth that the wealthier person’s relation has become like a weapon, even if they themselves doesn’t realize they are bloodying the other person with it. They were given the space to take up an interest, where the poorer person had that space completely denied. This is a fact that is deeply felt by the disadvantaged person, and it is a hard reality to parse when confronted with it. You do not have the time or space to think through life, just as it continually assaults you with the fact of uneven and unfair social development. A sense of guilt is embedded in your psyche before you ever know what to do with such feelings. You are confronted by an environment that impresses guilt upon you for failure, and this environment ventriloquizes its inhabitants to play the role of temporary oppressors, strictly contained in movements of appearance on the surface of social relations.

    For the poor, or even lower-middle working-class, it is not as easy as just deciding you want to take up some edifying activity. Often, you have not grown up in a space that can inculcate of respect for such activities. Poor people grow up in chaotic environments that aren’t conducive to sustained extracurricular activity, and are more physically and mentally strained in their schooling. Of course, we can’t say this is absolute, that the poor never develop an appreciation for the arts or that they never excell in school. In my poor family, all three siblings developed differently from one another in this regard. Not every poor person I grew up with refused education or artistic appreciation. More often than not, more than any kind of supposed moral failing, those around me were being failed by society, and were struggling to stay afloat. We all had various resentments, and there were illusions at play, but no resentment was mistaken about how society was abusing us. Society told us we had obligation, but made it clear that it had little obligation to us. Even with welfare, it did not come without society stressing that we were a burden. No one had any ease of conscience about their poverty. Eventually, the kind of welfare that I had as a child was gutted completely. Society reneged on even that small of an obligation. Mostly, poor people did not raise any objections. Nobody was ever proud to utilize such services. Most felt ashamed.

    While the wealthier person engaging in whatever higher activity may not be doing so to signal status, the fact is they have been afforded a much different life up to that point to enable them a certain indulgence or pursuit. That is the reality that is highlighted to the poorer person, that drives resentment, and exacerbates a sense of pride. They will be led to say to the wealthier person, “I can be happy while refusing your terms. I reject everything that makes you happy.” I get nervous about the way culture now appears to people. The wealthier forefront their lack of forgiveness to those who have failed a supposed moral duty to have good taste, and those opposite want to gouge out the eyes of the snobs who thumb their nose, and so double down.

    We need to take such matters out of moralistic language about people failing their duties to be educated. As if anyone on the left should ever frame education as a matter of individual responsibility in an environment that has not established the infrastructure to make such a thing possible. Any demand to self-educate should be less an ultimatum towards the poor, and more something paired with a willingness to help establish an environment conducive to such pursuits. The whole problem to begin with is that these problems around education appear as individualized failure, while the histories behind such discrepancies are invisibilized.

    Oddly enough, this is why I try so hard to re-frame political and critical theory. These exact social dynamics are explored in the work of the Frankfurt School. I think psychoanalysis can also help people get a handle on what the environment does to them. Dialectics, Marxism, etc, are tools that can help you move past surface appearance. It is actually more the poor who need these tools. I know what their obstacles are, and I am always trying to find a way to move people past the resentments that place such pursuits out of reach. I just wish people understood the landmine that is social resentment. There is so much enjoyment people get from doubling down and calling people stupid, and so much enjoyment in reusing the demand of the classes above you, but both sides are being played by class society and capitalism. These are matters that can be taken out of individualized, competitive terms, and addressed as social tools that can bridge the space between us. Not to make society perfectly harmonious, but to render us as people, who, at the very least, can share basic social desires.

  • Four versions of “Forces At Work” by The Feelies