Mawality

 Recuperation and the Left-Wing of Capital

Historically, the vast majority of leftist theory and practice has functioned as a loyal opposition to capitalism. Leftists have been (often vociferously) critical of particular aspects of capitalism, but always ready to reconcile themselves with the broader international capitalist system whenever they’ve been able to extract a bit of power, partial reforms — or sometimes, just the vague promise of partial reforms. For this reason leftists have often been quite justifiably criticized (by both ultra-leftists and by anarchists) as the left wing of capital.

It’s not just a problem that those leftists who claim to be anti-capitalist don’t really mean it, although some have consciously used such lies to gain positions of power for themselves in opposition movements. The major problem is that leftists have incomplete, self-contradictory theories about capitalism and social change. As a result their practice always tends towards the recuperation (or co-optation and reintegration) of social rebellion. Always with a focus on organization, leftists use a variety of tactics in their attempts to reify and mediate social struggles — representation and substitution, imposition of collectivist ideologies, collectivist moralism, and ultimately repressive violence in one form or another. Typically, leftists have employed all of these tactics in the most unrepentently heavy-handed and explicitly authoritarian of ways. But these tactics (except for the last) can also be — and have often been — employed in more subtle, less-overtly authoritarian ways as well, the most important examples for our purposes being the historical and present practices of many (but not all) left anarchists.

Reification is often most generally described as “thingification.” It’s the reduction of a complex, living process to a frozen, dead or mechanical collection of objects or actions. Political mediation (a form of practical reification) is the attempt to intervene in conflicts as a third-party arbiter or representative. Ultimately these are the definitive characteristics of all leftist theory and practice. Leftism always involves the reification and mediation of social revolt, while consistent anarchists reject this reification of revolt. The formulation of post-left anarchy is an attempt to help make this rejection of the reification of revolt more consistent, widespread and self-aware than it already is.

The integrity he wants, however, is strictly a matter of self-interest, quite different from submission to collective morality.

“The anarchist regulates his life not according to the law, like the legalists, nor according to a given collective mystique like the religious, the nationalists, or the socialists, but according to his own needs and personal aspirations. He is ready to make the concessions necessary to live with his comrades or his friends, but without making an obsession of these concessions….

“Instead of postponing individual happiness to the socialist or communist calends, he extols his present achievement of it by proclaiming the joy of living….

“The anarchists go forward, and by living for themselves, these egoists, they dig the furrow, they open the breach through which will pass the unique ones who will succeed them.”

Morality always involves stalling the development of a consistent critical theory of self and society. 

It short-circuits the developing strategy and tactics that are appropriate for this critical theory, and it encourages an emphasis on personal and collective salvation through living up to the ideals of this said morality, by idealizing a lifestyle or culture as virtuous and sublime. 

In the process this demonizes everything else as being either evil perversions or evil temptation

One natural emphasis of this then becomes the petty, continuing attempt to enforce the boundaries of virtue and evil by policing the lives of any person who claims to be a member of the in-group sect, while self righteously denouncing out-groups. 

Like, in the workerist milieu, this means attacking any person who doesn’t sing the praises of the virtues of the working class (or one true form) organization or to the virtues of the overbearing image of the Working Class culture or lifestyles (like beer drinking as opposed to drinking wine, rejecting hip subcultures, or driving a Nissan instead of a BMW). 

The goal, is to maintain the lines of inclusion and exclusion that are between the in-group and the out-group (the out-group is variously portrayed in highly industrialized countries to be the Middle and Upper Classes [Petty Bourgeois and Bourgeois], or the Managers and Capitalists big and small).

Living up to the standards of morality means sacrificing specific desires and temptations (regardless of the your situation that you may find yourself in) in favor of virtue rewards 

Don’t ever eat meat. Don’t be against (insert Democrat/Liberal 2.0 pet cause here), Don’t ever drive SUVs. Don’t ever work a 9–5 job. Don’t ever scab. Don’t ever vote. Don’t ever talk to a Right winger. Don’t ever take money from the government. Don’t ever pay your taxes. Don’t ever etc., etc. 

Not a very appealing way to go about living your life for any person that is interested in critically thinking about the world and evaluating what to do for oneself.

Going beyond and critiquing Morality involves constructing a critical theory of a person’s self and society (always self-critical, provisional and never totalistic) in which a defined goal of ending a person’s social alienation is never mixed up with reified partial goals. 

It involves emphasizing what we have to gain from radical critique and solidarity rather than what we must sacrifice or give up in order to live virtuous lives of politically correct morality.

Hard Atheism and the Ethics of Desire: An Alternative to Morality by Joel Marks may provide some alternatives for morality

I feel that collectivism is of the subordination of the individual to the group.

I reject the ideology of collective responsibility. This rejection does not mean I refuse social or class analysis. It means rather that I remove the moral judgment from such an analysis, while I refuse the dangerous practice of blaming individuals for activities that have been done in the name of (or that have been attributed to), a social category of which they are said to be a part, but about which they had no choice — i.e., “Jewish”, “male”, “white”, etc.). 

On the social level, the reappropriation of life, in addition to its full reappropriation on the individual level, can only happen when we stop identifying ourselves essentially in terms of our social identities.