The failure of left politics is reflected in its inability to distinguish itself from everything it claims to oppose, not least apparently when it degenerates into bourgeois moralism and pack coercion to dodge theoretical and historical conflicts it doesn’t want to face up to. This text has been fairly heavily edited for clarity.
Scholium || Humorless, self-righteous, intolerant, cringe-worthy. Once these words would have aptly described the Christian Right. Their very serious allegiance to silly ideas like God and patriotism made them an easy target to mock and troll. But now, said labels bring to mind awkward privilege confessions and the moralistic tone of social justice-oriented Leftists. What’s happened in such a short time to cause this total reversal?
The new, internet-based Right has unfortunately been loudest in pointing out “virtue signaling,” the practice of publicly professing moralistic platitudes. It’s done to show off one’s awareness and adherence to an increasingly popular set of values regarding systems of oppression. Politics becomes more about policing morality and grandstanding by blaming the effects of structural violence on individual attitudes. Virtue becomes about values we allege in speech, not the values we live.
I take virtue to mean morality, a prepackaged set of ethics and worldviews. Morality develops with and propagates a social force aspiring for power. It grows intertwined with both hegemonic systems of power, and counter-hegemonic forces vying to overthrow them. During the Cold war market capitalism and state capitalism fought for hegemony and the power to dominate all life; in the present day, capitalism is hegemonic, while anarchism is counter-hegemonic.
Morality’s role for the leviathans of state power is to seduce us into becoming their appendages by offering us a psychological wage, which both grants us the belief that we’re better than others. This sop gives our lives meaning in a meaningless world of alienated wage labour and devalued domestic work. Once morality has rooted inside enough of us, it protects itself through the creation of sacred cows which aids it in spreading tendrils across the world.
Good, aka Better
What is a psychological wage? In exchange for our toil performing moralistic duties, we are paid with feelings and beliefs that we are better than other people. For example, social media feels terrible. Even capitalist common sense will admit it for the moment. But for moral crusaders, whose mission entails spreading their gospel, this discomfort is the labor for which they receive positive feelings about themselves.
One gives up personal comfort in exchange for the belief, and resulting sense of self-satisfaction, that they embody what morality has designated as “good.” And goodness is only meaningful in contrast to those who are cast as “bad.” The feeling of being good is just that of being better than others. This causes the warping effect of martyrdom where receiving abuse feels pleasurable. You are not just being yelled at and insulted, you are engaging in Sacrifice.
Occasionally I see a pro-life activist praying outside of an abortion clinic or Planned Parenthood, holding a rosary or bible. Through their posture, their hands held together in supposed prayer, and their gaze aimed to the distance at nobody in particular, they are trying to show us sinners that they’re in communion with God. Like the social justice liberals, they have a righteous mission that will earn them animosity, which is just what they want. From the discomfort they feel when people yell at them, they gain smug self-satisfaction.
This partially explains what’s so off about the vulgar leftist and the Christian right-winger. Because they are receiving a psychological wage from the moralistic groupthink, they don’t care as much if they come off looking ridiculous outside of the clique of the self-appointed Elect. They are getting something out of the experience which distracts from that, or disguises their “persecution” as an inevitable consequence of doing the Lord’s work.
We all seem to have our own symbols of status, things that make us feel better than others: wealth, knowledge, scene cred, artistic talent, having nice things, various types of expertise, etc. But, compared to these, morality is especially heinous, because it creates Sacred Cows around which to organise dogma and the special status of the secular priests appointed by themselves to interpret it for the masses, and otherwise to guard ghettoised sects from criticism.
Perhaps anarchists radicalized since Ferguson haven’t experienced this, but there used to be smug pacifists at demonstrations who took pleasure in acting good in contrast to us bad anarchists. Reaching no further than the low-hanging pacifist fruit that the system took from the civil rights movement to protect itself, they got to feel the psychological boon of being good in contrast to anarchists.
Though caught up it in its own “selfless” acts of sacrifice, morality is actually easy. It gives its adherents a prepackaged set of instructions for living a set of values. With morality, it is not necessary to stumble through the world, feel out different values and ideas, adopt some, try to live up to them, ditch or tweak them, etc. Instead, it provides a pre-configured value system. Individuals are good or bad, revolutionary or reactionary, depending on our willingness or not to enable self-appointed arbiters of revolutionary morality.
This is especially relevant for activists and others “in the know” about systems of oppression. Revolutionary morality must assume the worst as default about error, and paint fallibility as willing complicity in the structural violence of capitalist, patriarchal class hierarchy, such that its self-appointed arbiters might position themselves solutions to problems created by their own judgemental attitude and militant ignorance.
We create a social justice cop in our heads who tell us its our duty to obey the self-appointed arbiters of revolutionary morality for the greater good of the cause. Duty is a curious thing to find in the First World during the 21st century. This rotting corpse of a concept brings to mind a uninformed Prussian military officer adorned in clinking medallions, or an arranged marriage that young people go through for the sake of their families. Its logic appears inherently authoritarian.
Ressentiment
Bakunin once observed of Christianity that it was fortunate in being born into a world of slaves. We could say much the same about the vulgar left, which produces slaves to be emancipated from ourselves by enlightened secular priesthoods with as much performative zeal. Would these psychological traps work for healthy or contented people? Would they really feel the need to compete for a monopoly of moral virtue the same way capitalists complete for monopolies of wealth in order to have any value?
We are born into this society as the dispossessed. Capitalism beat the world into submission hundreds of years ago and it conditions our lives from the get-go. Accepting our alienated lot in life, we cling to the psychological value added to us by morality. Disenfranchised and disempowered, we cope. We use psychological systems that label us winners of some sort, even if it’s only at the expense of whoever has to lose. Morality, like cults, seduces us by sensing our weakness and promising us the world. All we must give in return is our individuality, capacity to think for ourselves and ethical core.
Sacred Cows
Morality protects itself by creating and wearing the armor of sacred cows. “Sacred cow” is a euphemism for something being off-limits for criticism. To disagree with a group’s sacred cows is to risk being ostracized. Thus, nobody wants to talk about the taboo, from Kronstadt and the inability of the left to differentiate itself from the ‘ends justify the means’ idealism of everything we claim to oppose, to carceral feminism, to the relationship between single-issue politics and radical feminist transphobia, or do anything that implies they oppose them.
Any argument or point that goes against one, or even offers it friendly critique, must be defended on the terms of the Sacred Cow itself. If you say bad things about NEP State Capitalism and bureaucrats exercising power in the name of the working class, you hate egalitarianism. Assuming the worst as default enables the policing action of the self-appointed arbiters of secular morality. The Christian Right and Vulgar Left appear so corny because their sterile, closed groupthink contains so many sacred cows that none internal to their groups can point out to each other how ridiculous they look, in fear of being demonised and purged for nonconformity.
When someone tells me that white people need to be good allies to black people, and follow their leadership, I prepare myself for a daunting conversation, with landmines everywhere. First, I must demonstrate I understand that black people are oppressed. Then, it is expected for me to show that I’m enabling the politics of middle-class respectability amongst nonwhites. If I don’t enable the middle class, I have to explain why. If I don’t fall back on the sacred cow’s logic of necessity, and the mentality of trying to solve the contradictions of class amidst nominal democratic egalitarianism, or trying to make an endless growth economy work on finite planet, I risk my reputation.
Clearly the goal is not to facilitate understanding, or to get to the root of the problem, but instead to promote a party line. If talking through complex political issues is so important, which it is why make it so difficult? Revolutionary morality and the sacred cows of unreconstructed dogma ensure we do not raise critical dialogue. Authoritarian regimes impose their will with secret police, censorship, and displays of punishment meant to intimidate their subjects into submission; the compulsive morality of social justice liberalism apes their violence and terror.
We are reminded every month or two, with public call-outs and ostracization, what happens to people who say the wrong thing. Both formal and informal repression aim to produce a chilling effect in order to limit what ideas can circulate or become dominant. You must guard yourself around people you do not explicitly trust in case they would turn you into a stepping stone for revolutionary virtue-hoarding.
I point this out not to monger fear or over-inflate the threat of social justice morality, but to point out that we are being trained to accept an authoritarian dynamic for social control. If the Left were to become more powerful, its work is half-done, because we’re already conditioned to tolerate and tremble before its repressive mechanisms.
This dynamic is likely not conscious. The Left was born as a concept during the French Revolution, referring to the layout of the National Convention. The Jacobins turned on each other and created a terror where nobody could speak freely for fear of being sent to the guillotine. The sacred cows of the Left are the inheritance of the National Convention and guillotine, in that they aim to foster social control in the name of overcoming it. As the progeny of the Jacobins, such is also the legacy of Marxism-Leninism.
Though anti-oppression language existed in the Sixties and Seventies, it was situated among a Left that had muscle. Contrast that to now. The only place the Left has anything remotely like power is in cultural production, its ability to define elements of contemporary society’s common sense. This power largely resides in the moral psychological wage, as well as social pressure. Avenues for social change, challenging maldistribution of wealth and class monopolies over resources, ending patriarchy, etc are closed off to a vulgar left that has traded personality politics for principle, and morality-policing for a plan.
Organising for class struggle, taking over the means of production, or even just providing Flint with clean drinking water, is considerably more difficult than policing morality. We are in the midst of an authoritarian phase of history as an insurgent global corporate oligarchy captures national governments, colonises their liberal forms and turns them to the project of extractive imperialism. Corporate sponsorship and bought politics are aiding the rise of fascist demagogues throughout the world.
The electorally-oriented vulgar left in the West will not gain power within corporate-captured political systems. The policing of revolutionary morality will not solve this dilemma. Attacking low-hanging fruit close to hand, aided by the public and viral nature of social media technology, becomes a crutch for frustration and alienation that can no longer find constructive avenues of resolution. The only value of purging deviants and reconstructing oneself a solution to power struggles created by judgmental moralism is to hide the fact that the projects of liberalism and leninism have failed.
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