"We are all humans! PROPER humans…"

Bourgeois moralism continues to haunt the left even though some of us should know better. Some of the predictably banal responses to Thatcher's death, for example, are proof of this haunting: that, in the midst of all the laudable celebration of a dead reactionary, you have the occasional "leftist" chiming in with some appeal to liberal humanistic platitudes ("celebrating the death of any human is wrong", or "we socialists should be more humane", or etc.) was annoying but predictable. Thankfully, there are enough people who remember the violence of Thatcher's politics countering this pseudo-Gandhian ideology that, for once, this moralism was buried in an avalanche of anti-Thatcher articles and parties. And so, because I don't feel the need to write what so many people have written already, I'm not going to bother posting an obituary about why there is nothing wrong with celebrating the death of a reactionary. Rather, I think it is simply important to note that these outraged responses to the anti-Thatcher funereal celebrations represent a clear symptom of the liberal humanism that is often quite compelling for the average anti-capitalist.Indeed, some of the reactions to my most recent post made me interested in blogging again on the problem of bourgeois moralism––reactions that are part of the same symptom that encouraged some to preach to the anti-Thatcher celebrants about our shared humanity and the sadness one must feel when one member of the species dies. The very same mindset is behind all complaints that I was possibly being violent and psychotic when I joked about "gulags"; the same mindset that mobilizes simplistic logical equivocation to gleefully argue that there is a great irony in my claim that the oppressor should be oppressed (apparently this is a contradiction because of the word "oppression"!); and probably the same mindset that, oft-times, thinks that socialism––because it is more "moral" than capitalism––can and must be achieved through peaceful means.Some of us take Marx and Engels' claim thatseriously. We believe, and with historical justification, that a ruling class that maintains its rule through violence is not going to cease expropriating, exploiting, and oppressing without being violently overthrown . While we do not celebrate the quite often tragic necessity of violence , we do not equivocate according to utopian and abstract logicAnd we tend to treat all attempts to defend the "humanity" of the oppressor, and the banal moralism that is behind these attempts, as expressions of ruling class ideology. Moreover, when we are forced to think through the problems elicited by revolutionary necessity we end up being faced with the problem of enforcing socialism against the remaining elements of the reactionary classes and, by examining world historical revolutions, wondering about what mechanisms will prevent the next revolution from being overthrown.As the linked articles in the above paragraph should demonstrate, I've been thinking through this problem for some time and am of the opinion that it cannot be answered by abstract appeals to a shared humanity and moral purity. After all, to have a discussion about some pure and shared morality is to have a discussion where there is always an uninvited guest who defines the terms of this discussion: bourgeois morality. And since I've discussed this problem in the aforelinked posts, and there is a lot of intersection in these posts (as well as others I did not cite), I am not going to repeat my arguments here.Rather, I want to wonder at the hegemony of bourgeois humanism and why it is so compelling. The easy answer, which is true on a conceptual level, is that those of us who think according to these patterns have simply been socialized since birth according to the "common sense" ideology of liberalism. And I would be lying if I pretended as if I was outside of this socialization: it is not as if I'm some coldly calculating robot who psychotically praises mechanisms of class suppression, who rubs his hands gleefully whenever a reactionary dies, and who has never at any point in his life been drawn to the anti-communist narrative that has presented "gulags" and reeducation as the unqualifiedof totalitarianism. So there is a reason this moralism is compelling, and though this reasoncan be located in ruling class ideology, it still requires more investigation.There is the fact, after all, that many people who end up adopting a socialist-style politics have been drawn to these politics because they have also glimpsed, however crudely, the actual contradiction of bourgeois morality. (Unless we have done so, as one funny but probably bio-determinist study recognized , because we are just more intelligent than our conservative counterparts.) Trained to recognize the sanctity of the human species, which is not by itself a bad thing, we are forced to wonder at the inequity of this sanctity: why is it okay forpeople to be slaughtered in the name of the same values that apply onlypeople––is not "an injustice for some an injustice for all"? By following this question, which emerges from liberal humanism, to what appears, at first glance, as its logical conclusion we end up locating our politics within a concept of human commonality where everyone is an equal rights bearer and any imperialist/capitalist justification that bases itself on the same principles (i.e. "humanitarian intervention") is immediately grasped as a grand moral deceit.For some of us, this foray into a universal notion of humanism is enough to provide a radical break with the status quo interpretation of morality and is thus quite laudable. The problem, however, is that we never really followed the problem of liberal humanism to its logical conclusion; we only followed it to the first moment of contradiction. We never did ask why this ideology continues to generate, despite all claims of, an exclusionary concept of the human species where it can use the––an injustice for some is an injustice for all––to promote the "humanitarian interventions" we find abhorrent. Inversely, then, we are incapable of declaring solidarity with the revolutionary movements of the system's victims who do not feel that the "injustice" they level upon their oppressors is "an injustice for all". For if we accept this maxim in an unqualified sense then we must be forced, on the plane of the most asinine abstract logic, to agree that the violence of the oppressed against the oppressor is identical to the violence of the oppressor against the oppressed (even though the former is a response to oppression and sometimes, in its most revolutionary variant, aimed at the possibility of ending all oppression) because both do not recognize a common and shared humanity.(A side note… Here we find ourselves trapped in the problem of post-modern political praxis: the rejection of totalization means the inability to decide on preciselycounts as oppression outside of some bland and toothless notions of "stand-point ethics" and "subalternity". Interestingly enough, post-modernismreject the concept of the human subject and thus attempts to place itself, in its own way, outside of bourgeois humanism… But at the same time it ends up reincorporating the content of this bourgeois humanism within its notion of the decentred subject. Why? Because there is no one that is being oppressed, since there is nothing thatbe oppressed due to the fact that there is no basis for declaring what counts as oppression. If all attempts to establish oneself as a subject, even collectively, are doomed to become murderous, and all revolutionary ideologies are "totalizing" (no more or less "totalizing", once the theory is reduced to its political implications, then the status quo of domination) then every movement with a coherent politicsis an instance of murderous power. Upon this pedestal, which is ultimately a dead-end for revolution, is built identity politics which is a perfect example of bourgeois moralism: while claiming to be radical, especially in its thorough recognition of sites of oppression and privilege, it does so in the most moralistic sense. But again, all of this is a [rather hasty] tangental point which I may or may not unpack in a future post…)Of course, it is worth recognizing that Marxtend to philosophically ground the necessity of socialism/communism upon the concept of a specific notion of human commonality. In the introduction to the, for example, he distinguishes his approach from bourgeois political economy by declaring solidarity with the concept of therather thananimal. Elsewhere, both Marx and Engels were wont to speak of socialism as being a(or more properly "rehumanization") of society. And yet, as much as this is important on an abstract theoretical level, it is clear that Marx understood this final "humanization" as something that was only possible outside of a bourgeois humanism that understands the bourgeois concept of "Man" (and here I am intentionally using the gendered concept because it really does speak to the ideology of bourgeois humanism and was not a concept, in my opinion, accidentally chosen by bourgeois utopians) as being universal. And it is precisely this understanding of humanity, which is one thoroughly compromised by a class society which can only speak of humanity according to bourgeois rights, that is behind our "common sense" morality.We are drawn to a vague humanitarian ethics because we glimpse the contradictions of bourgeois morality, because we see the rational kernel behind its platitudes, but we are still caught up in its ideology: we see "rights" violated and we are enraged, we must be equally enraged when "the sanctity of life" of reactionaries are mocked by the victims of said reactionaries. We do not think of the necessities that can sling-shot us past this bourgeois humanism of equal rights. We do not often grasp what it might mean to struggle for a deeper concept of humanization because we cannot recognize that the current ideology of "common humanity", where everyone must be murderously subordinated to the only people who count as, is actually standing in the way of the re/humanization proclaimed by Marx and Engels. We are troubled by the notion that the expropriators must be expropriated in order for such a moment of commonality toexist; we want to believe that this commonality can already be understood and that, in order to be truly moral, we have to equivocate between the rights of the oppressed and the rights of the oppressors… But between equal rights, as Marx pointed out in the first volume of, greater force decides.Obviously I am reaching the point of philosophical obscurantism, if I haven't reached it already, and I apologize if I've been too hasty or opaque. The best way to escape with this descent into conceptual interrogation––a descent, I think it is only fair to argue,––is to simply point out something that should be terrifyingly obvious: those who concretely occupy the social positions of exploitation and/or oppression do not care about theof their exploiters/oppressors. That is, the agent of revolution has never needed to be convinced of its agency because of some ethical assumption of a "shared humanity" or any of that sentimental moralism that has convinced some of us ("some of us" generally a cipher for economic/social privilege and petty-bourgeois academicism) to question bourgeois morality.If you have nothing left to lose but your chains, and are forced to recognize the class responsible for enforcing these chains, you are not drawn to revolution because of some moralistic argument but because you viscerally recognize the necessity… And this is the moment, if properly understood, where all moralistic arguments about violence––the ethics of revolutionary violence, the death of reactionaries, etc.––are annihilated. Does a revolutionary movement consisting of the most wretched of the earth spend much time contemplating the humanity of those whoseis premised upon this very wretchedness? The question is rather rhetorical because it is extremely doubtful: Fanon, for instance, talks about how the oppressed/exploited masses' "permanent dream" is to tear the oppressor/exploiter from hir pedestal. And in the face of this permanent dream all of us who speak ofandwill be forced to reassess our politics.