Category: Politics

Let’s start with some Aristotelian categories (recognizing that such categories are more fluid and contradictory than Aristotle thought):  There are those who push agendas that are reactionary, wrong-headed, morally bankrupt; and there are those who are misguided supporters of such agendas.  There are agendas based on middle-class politics; and agendas based on blatantly anti-working class, right-wing positions.

Social justice activists are, in my opinion, wrong.  Very wrong.  Scarily wrong.  By either not seeing class distinctions, or by seeing them as merely another in a list of causes of oppression, they (in my opinion) dangerously misinterpret the world, and leave us open to attacks by reaction, and actively interfere with the effort to unite the working class and prepare it to do battle with our enemies.  We saw in the cases of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Julian Assange how they gave aid and comfort to the most repulsive right wing elements.

Overt racists and male chauvinists, on the other hand,  are actively and consciously supporting our enemies.  That is an important distinction.  I don’t waste time talking to them.  We will have things out with the Beales of the world at the barricades, not in the parlor.  Any innocently misguided individuals among them are not going to have their minds changed by argument, but by the developing class struggle.

Certainly, some social justice activists are not worth talking to–many of the theorists consciously obscure the class issues while cynically solidifying their upper-middle class positions and comfortable lives by talking about how others need to recognize their “privilege.”  But many, many, many social justice activists are people who see the same problems I do.  They are honestly and legitimately outraged by  oppression of working people, of minorities, of women, of homosexuals, of those with disabilities.  We differ strongly on what to do about it, and often about the causes, but we agree about the problems.

So I’ll talk to them, and I’ll be as polite as I can manage and do my best to make convincing arguments.

And when there is a conflict between social justice activists and right-wing assholes, there is a time for saying, “This whole dispute is crap, the fundamental issues are the things none of you are talking about. A plague on both your houses.”  And then there is a time for saying, “Yeah, we disagree, but I have to take a position with you anyway,  always maintaining my right to express my differences as I do so.”  I never agreed with the non-violence of Martin Luther King, or with protest politics in general; but when his supporters were being beaten and shot, our first step was to make it clear that we were on their side against the cops–only then could we fight within that movement for a turn toward revolutionary politics and class unity.

In the case of #Gamergate, I was pulled into it by something intensely personal that happened, the details of which are unimportant.  But having been pulled in, it is obvious which side I’m on.  I do not blame or criticize anyone without a direct stake in the matter for staying out of this: on many levels, the whole controversy is trivial (of course, on other levels it is not).  But if you do take a stand on it, I believe that any decent human being, regardless of any disagreement he or she may have with the policies of social justice activists, needs to recognize misguided friend from foe.

 

One reason I’ve wanted to stay out of the #GamerGate controversy was because I have no skin in the game; I’m not much of a gamer and I don’t read game reviews. For another, I dislike most “feminist criticism” for many reasons; for one, I believe it reinforces categories that we ought to be working to eliminate or reduce. And the controversy ties in with identity politics and social justice activism; my disagreements with these are well known.  On the whole I believe noticing things like dehumanizing treatment of women or offensive stereotypes of minorities in media doesn’t require feminist criticism; it just requires noticing when human beings are oversimplified, stereotyped, treated shabbily in art.

But now someone tried to start a campaign to get people to boycott Tor books because a particular Tor author has been vocal in his opposition to #GamerGate.

Okay, fuck that noise.

Gamergaters are trying to narrow discourse. This is wrong.

Gamergaters are using threats and intimidation to narrow discourse.  This is profoundly wrong.

And, moreover, the ones who aren’t idiots are assholes, except for those who are both.

There.  Is my position sufficiently clear?

I’m a Tor author. If you are keeping a list of those to boycott for being vocal in opposition to #GamerGate, please add me to it.

 

 

(If you’re not up to speed on this, you could check here and here. It isn’t pretty.)

A few minutes ago, on Twitter, I suggested that if illegal use of lethal force by the police were a capital crime, it would be much harder to fill the ranks of police forces, and also have additional benefits.

It was, in some degree, a snark, but it led someone to ask about my stand on capital punishment.  I’ll answer that here.

For most practical purposes, I believe the state doesn’t have the moral right to take a human life.  I do not, however, take that as being true for all times and all places under all circumstances.   Usually, when someone says, “Well what about…” it is followed by a description of some heinous crime.  But the more heinous the crime, usually, the more likely it is that the person who committed that act is sick; and taking the life of someone who is sick merely for being sick is barbaric.  It should also be noted that, in addition to the number of death row inmates being disproportionately minorities, and wildly disproportionately poor and working class, there are also a huge proportion who are mentally impaired to some degree or another.  Killing such people is monstrous.

Are there circumstances in which I would favor capital punishment?  Well, if you’re talking about State killing, my first question is, what State?  A government responsible for Hiroshima, for Nagasaki, for the war crimes against Vietnam and creating dictatorships in South America, the Middle East, Ukraine, a State that, today, is encouraging its police forces to simply shoot us down for the most trivial excuses, well, such a State long ago lost the moral right to take anyone’s life, ever, for anything.  Show me a State I can support–for example, a workers state, and show me that, under certain circumstances, it must be willing to take lives and use other terrorist means to preserve itself from Imperialism, and then, yes, I’d be willing to concede that such barbarism might temporarily be necessary.  If I am to support the right, in fact the duty, of the working class to take power into its hands, then it would hypocritical not to also support actions necessary for the working class to protect itself from fascist counter-revolution.

 

On Saturday, August 8th of this year, an 18-year-old African-American named Michael Brown was murdered by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, a working class suburb of St. Louis.  Less than a month before, Eric Garner, also black, was choked to death by New York City police while his hands were raised in surrender.  Just a couple of days ago, the guy who caught Garner’s murder on his cellphone camera, was mysteriously found to be carrying a weapon and was arrested (I suspect the official charge will be a weapons violation, because “recording police murder” isn’t yet a violation of any ordinance).  Meanwhile, the police in Ferguson are using rubber bullets, tear gas, attack dogs, and indiscriminate beatings against those who dare to suggest that something might be wrong with all of this.

These are only a few of many such incidents, and, amid the horror and outrage we feel, we can find one silver lining: The role of the police is becoming clear to broader and broader layers of society.  As the police militarize themselves with automatic weapons, drones, and tanks, and feel more and more free to fall back on plain, simple murder, we become more aware of exactly what they are protecting and who they are serving.  Though hardly a consolation for those who’ve lost a loved one, it at least is a cause for hope that this increased awareness will, sooner rather than later, translate into effective action.  The police are the defenders of capitalism, and the more blatantly they demonstrate this, the clearer it becomes to masses of people in general, and the working class in particular.

But this increased awareness, itself, is a threat to capitalism; the working class is not helpless–far from it!  Every wheel that turns in our complex, international society, is, at the end of the day, turned by the working class; the ruling class is not so blind as to be unaware of this, nor so complacent as to not be threatened by it.  What then to do?  The bourgeoisie has more than one weapon in its arsenal.  While using the police as domestic terrorists with its right hand, with its left, it brings us–the Left.  That is, those who use leftist-sounding rhetoric in order to make sure our outrage remains harmlessly channeled back into support for the system that commits these atrocities.

One must be a fool or a scoundrel to say that race is not a factor in these killings: the racism of police departments is well-known.  But one must be a different sort of fool, or a different sort of scoundrel, to say that race is the only factor.  The Al Sharptons of the world are delighted to take this opportunity to raise support for the Democratic Party,  and close on their heels come the supporters of identity politics who want, above all, to remain in their comfort zones, if not in their comfortable positions.  “This is about racism, that’s all.  There is no need to discuss the mad drive for profit, the protection of private property.  This has nothing to do with the appalling and ever-increasing income disparity, or with imperialist wars prosecuted against the will of the people.  That this is happening at the same time the US helped engineer a fascist coup in Ukraine and is cheering on Israel’s open slaughter of Palestinians is pure coincidence, just as it’s coincidence that as the president orders murders without due process beyond our borders the police carry out exactly the same thing within our borders.  It’s just those darned congressional Republicans.  Capitalism itself is not the issue.  And don’t look behind the curtain.”  But the curtain is getting thin, and all that is required to see behind it is to open one’s eyes.  That dark shape just past the gauze is called the class struggle.  May I make the observation that the chief law enforcement officer of the United States is African-American?  May I point out that we have yet to see these police murders take place in Baldwin Hills, California or Mitchellville, Maryland?

Yes, indeed, racism is a factor.  But–a factor in what?  A factor in the evolving police culture, a culture determined in the immediate sense by interactions among individual cops: what jokes they tell, comments about how willing they are to shoot, mutual encouragement for the worst excesses, the subtle pressures inevitably exerted by and on those who work closely together.  But that is, as I said, in the immediate sense.  What determines that culture in the last analysis is the needs of the job.  The job is protecting capitalism, and the more terrified the bourgeoisie is by the anger they are stirring up against themselves, the more repressive their armed servants need to be.  We saw that in the police response to the Occupy movement, harmless though that movement was, and now we are seeing it ever more sharply.  Those who cry loudest that racism is the only factor are, by and large, those with something to gain from it; either sleazy politicians like Al Sharpton or  Jesse Jackson, or academics who can freely write “anti-racism” essays as a publication credit for their tenure track positions but dare not speak out against capitalist property relations.

It is absurd to claim that we are living in a police state: we still have the right to protest, at least within certain limits, and I still have the freedom to write this blog post without undue fear of official harassment, and Obama and the NSA still feel the need to justify domestic spying: the rights and freedoms we have won are still largely intact.  But it is naive to think that movements toward a police state are not taking place.  This is the lesson of what is happening in Arizona, and the “constitution-free zones,” and what happened in Boston after the marathon bombing, and the way the cops increasingly feel at liberty to take our lives without a second thought.  Police state measures are being prepared, and we need to be aware of it.  Failing to go beyond the question of racism is to leave us ideologically prostrate and theoretically helpless as the enemy forces gather at our border.

Let’s not do that.