On being on the scarcely visible political left

It is changing, but it was scarcely visible in my time. The Vietnam war era ended in a defeat for conservative social forces which then regrouped, and my generation from 1970 to at least the beginning of the end of the neoliberalism in the 2008 crisis lived through the triumphant restoration of a form of social power that did not benefit us, though it may have seemed to for many people while things were going well.

I refuged myself in a kind of European cultural studies, which was an adventure in philosophy (“theory”) and the art of film, which I see as a medium of social criticism, not as something that is only good or “true” when and if and as it is being profitably purchased and enjoyed. Enjoyment is irrelevant except as means. Thinking clearly is what is needed.

Also, I reject the other corrolarry attribute of total privatization of social life and the mind: the psychological culture, whose fundamental axiom is that whatever bothers you is essentially just about you. I say art is impossible if you assume that. Or it would be reduced to entertainment and perhaps therapy, the only way it would be useful. Which is a legacy of Aristotle in aesthetics, a theory that is, and was, depoliticizing. For theater was born as an art of politicization. It was a political art because it politicizes.

Art that matters makes what affects you political. Otherwise, it only affects you, maybe makes you happy, maybe will help your therapist help you manage your life as your doctor medicates you to confirm your destiny of sadness, from which he or she is ostensibly helping deliver you (ultimately this is only possible through death). The society of art as entertainment and the culture of private satisfactions only is one of depoliticization and devitalization, ultimately thanatological. And thanatology is also at work in military and sometimes even governmentally organized humanitarian operations.

This war is not a Jewish question. The only Jewish question in its context is whether “we” should be committed, on some (obscure, thus to be investigated and clarified, affirmed or denied) basis or set of reasons, to this kind of destruction. But it is not fundamentally from other neo-imperial wars including the one that defined my generation, America’s in Vietnam.

The Holocaust remains a principal Jewish question as the modern possibilities of liberation from feudal subjugation also are, and both of these questions are by definition and essential character not specifically Jewish ones but global ones. They are also questions about a history in which Europe was central. In some ways it still is, though American liberals typically deny this, because they don’t like it, thinking “Europe” is the name of a history of oppression only. It is, but not only that, and that is because “every document of civilization is a document of barbarism” (Walter Benjamin), and vice-versa. European civilization dominated the world on the eve of World War I, and the subsequent period has seen its decline, which for about a century involved that role politically (not historically nor entirely in cultural terms) by the United States, which is now in relative decline. It is not reactionary to want to learn from European culture; it only would be to assert a cultural identity and be hostile to foreigners, a huge problem now that is not constitutive of European or American “civilization” (a funny word since neither is exactly that, just as the Jewish world(s) is not) but of a possibility within it that also has found there ample useful resources for a critique of this. I would plead for myself only that my American neighbors who think they hate people like myself or my family not to. Meanwhile, I want to understand and get on with them better while also learning as much as I can that may be useful. To return to the Holocaust, it is geographically best identified as a European, not specifically Jewish, problem, but it is also a global one because it was an event in a modernity whose social and institutional forms persist. The ethnonationalists, Jewish, Black, and others, think the Holocaust was caused by European, or German, culture, being “who” it is. We on the left deny this. If you affirm that proposition and do not deny it you are on the right and not the left, just as surely as if you affirm your identity against the annoying provocations of those who hate you for it.

Meanwhile, the Jewish problems are everyone’s, and there is little if any direct political value in any autochthonous Jewish intellectual or cultural tradition because outside the religious texts mainly from antiquity and the early middle ages, there aren’t any, and that’s not a bad but good thing. All the Jewish culture and people I have known were part of a larger culture, often excelling within it. If you visit Israel and bother to notice you will see that this is true there also, only not in the minds of the exclusivist ethnicist ideologues. They have a wall but no symphony, mathematical sciences, etc. that would belong to them in some particular and essentially exclusive way and why on earth would any sane person want that? Jewish culture was also hybrid, related to the fact that it was exilic.

Now global culture is hybrid and exilic. Everyone is, that’s the destiny, get used to it.

The principal difference between American and European society and culture is that American culture has this far greater sense of what I would call a "feudal" mentality. This manifests itself as a demand for authenticity and for cultivation of a "deep" self. It also manifests itself as a profound conformism whereby with any group of people or any person who might possibly be in a position to claim power and authority over you, you really have little freedom, except in the American ideology, which proclaims it endlessly. For you had better obey or else.

All of American culture's more profound rootedness in dense forms of subjectivity, which is obvious if you glance at us from outside, is part of this.

I meet people from England and other places who tell me they learned after a bit of time here to be cool with Americans. No sharp ironic remarks, Americans might hit you, or assume that you're an bad person from the wrong faction, you didn't respect them, etc. You cannot speak critically to an American or argue with them. You'll be accused of assaulting them, hating their mothers and fathers or besmirching their identity, and God, that hurts, I mean, words of discord in your face are for fighting and our highest court has established this. Forget this at your peril.

The subcultures that came out of slavery are quite like this, both for the whites and blacks among them, who in their different ways have might be said to have all to often struggled against this cultural formation incompletely. Also, the only available mainstream alternative is the one defined, still, by the American Civil War: either you are for an idea of "liberty" that tolerates and requires the subjection of others, or you are for liberal capitalism with its ideology of opportunity and commitment to a society where equality and social fraternity of any kind are very much in doubt, always and perhaps necessarily (constitutionally, in part, in both legal and material/historical senses), while liberty of the individual, which is basically to make money, and succeed in ways measured only by doing so, is championed by all. It is not difficult to see that much of American radical left politics is motivated by concerns that are better explained by the peculiarities of American history than by anything like the class struggles that partly defined modern Europe (with the, only, partial exception of the UK) after the French Revolution. Further, our historical context has destined us to rampant postures of extremism that in the end are something like enforced rhetoric.

European culture since the Renaissance has been one in which being modern itself was something of a question, often asked and kept alive in thought and the arts, and the background was the peculiar premodern conditions that included forms of personal subjection that European modernity repudiated (with social and political revolutions that had roots in peasant revolts) and distanced itself from (with the rise of capitalism) in very different ways than happened in the United States.

Some young Americans turn to Europe to find something seemingly missing in their culture. I did this, and it must be said that this is a very American thing to do. But it also has the effect of an estrangement that can make practical life doing any kind of business with other people very difficult.

Our society now has a system of management of persons mainly through psychology and related fields. Most educated people believe in this, having been socialized into it in schools, which are mainly ideological training grounds for future workers, in whatever social roles the economy makes available to them or is expected that it might. Professionals can appreciate this sort of thing through an ideology. If you fall into the cracks of the system, it will be used against you. Many black kids grow up knowing it probably will be anyway, and some poor kids whose ancestors were more lucky, or less unlucky, also at least suspect this.

The right wing politics prominent today is a result largely of people who were once socialized to believe that this society and its 'systems' would work for them realizing that it does not.

A true left-wing politics would by definition care about the poor and be rooted in struggles among them. As is now widely known, the "liberal" and "progressive" factions with which, in America especially (which has no political party with autonomous roots in the "working class" of non-university-educated, non-professional workers that in Europe began to constitute itself as a political faction when peasants found themselves thrown into factory life and cities), after the 1960s allied itself with the concerns and interests of the professional class, largely on the basis of ideologies of inclusion and reparative justice, often linked to militant postures of self-assertion that are typically not a lot more than that, focusing on "race, gender, and sexuality" and other forms of social marginalization, leaving the "liberal" Democratic Party one of social welfare tied to rhetorics of opportunity to find economic success.

Biden, Harris, both Clintons, Obama, etc. delivered America to Trump. It was a quarrel internal to the guardians of the corporate state. The liberals of the corporate establishment lost to those of the right, whose broader aims they share. They are to keep the world's people in line mainly through police and military operations, and do so increasingly at home, as in all periods of right-wing retrenchment where colonial practices are brought back to the metropole to use against workers and the poor, and the rebellious among "intellectuals" of the elites and their children. The liberals want to manage the world's people and places and resources on behalf of capital in a way that is also liberal, especially for themselves and their families and friends. Their professional culture has liberal values, and they are mostly trained in elite universities to which they remain attached, though not necessarily to anything that is done there, which they support on sunny days and ideally but in a discretionary ways that are subject to wise practical judgment about what is current practically possible given their interests. Now this liberalism is in decline everywhere, and as with the rise of fascisms and authoritarian governance in the past, the liberals tend to oppose the rise of authoritarianism in ways that are fundamentally weak and non-committal. I place my faith politically in the nonexistent left, which I define as the faction that wants popular and not elite rule, because "we" want something other than to be managed by practitioners of governmentality on behalf of capital. Especially when this means murderous wars abroad, and repression at home, as it now quite manifestly does. I belong politically to a nonexistent faction and I work in one of the arts. I intend to stay that way while trying to work for the better world that may not come into existence in my life time. Some say no we must only against the destruction of what we have, but these things go together. The form of capitalism we have renders wars like the current one the US is waging by proxy in Palestine inevitable and even necessary by its logic. That is the problem. It's not a Jewish question specifically at all, though there is a question about the Holocaust and its causes, which the right (Jewish and otherwise, American especially) answers in one way, making possible this war, and the left in another, making necessary opposition to it, and not in the name of the victory of a different faction engaged in the same war, but in the name of peace and building a world that is no longer one of neofeudal ethnic state entities warring against others in the mere name of their own survival, which the warfare pretends to advance and in fact diminishes and tends to destroy.

I have seen even among supposed political leftists in my lifetime in America very little beyond policing of attitudes, which obviously from the standpoint of those of us who know that we are likely to be the policed and managed ones, often enough ostensibly in the name of protecting the feelings from being hurt (as Biden once famously offered poor people in a debate with Trump, in the first of two elections lost to that savvier operator), because they are women or minorities.

A tenuous political left exists now that is inevitably linked to electoral politics, candidates, and demands on government.

I have reached the conclusion that almost any statement about anything that you think is interesting and important and that you might state to anyone else or in their presence in American society is mistakenly said, and will. only get you into trouble. You will be disliked for your personal style and obnoxiousness in Schmuckishly pretending to be right about anything, for who do you think you are? Though this mostly happens if and when the content of what you say is something someone else doesn’t like or can’t stand, and then, in American spaces anyway, they almost inevitably attack you for not the content of what you said but its style or form, or they attack you (blame you as gultily wrong while, and as a way of, demanding that you act in accordance with their normative expectations, the apparent violation of which is what in American society is so not tolerated, and very much in contrast to the way in other societies I know a bit about people do say things to each other and in their faces). Desperately. people quickly look for something else about what you are doing or saying that they can say that you are wrong about. The reason is that in American mainstream culture people are not mistaken in what they say or do but wrong in their persons, which means they should not like you. If they are Democratic Party liberals or think they are left-liberals, then you have intolerably acted illiberally. Perhaps for example you made a categorical statement: Xs are F. You can’t say to an American liberal that Xs are F, let alone that all are. That would be an unliberal generalization. So you must be told that the facts are various and wandering and multiple and complicated, and anyway, who are you to tell me what to think or do? You’re not the boss of me (my boss who pays me is, or the leader I follow or star I adulate is the one who can tell us what to do and think and we’ll follow them). I have been hit for such reasons and many times. Often by black men and they think it’s about race and for me at least it wasn’t, until they made it so, which may have been their intent, and they certainly wanted to assert that it is about race and in most of these cases it is clear enough from what they also said that that is what they meant to do and did. This proves to therm and an audience that they are oppressed because of race by assholes like me whose asshole character according to them only has to do with my supposed whitenesss, which is more their ideological construction than mine, or was anyway, and also has to do for them with the mistaken belief that I was trying to slavemasterly assert superiority over them by saying something, or by disobeying their authority, which for them is the right to dominate me, angrily demand my obedience to their commands at the threat of violent punishment if I instantly do not, and all of this I believe is a result and expression on their part of a false liberationist black racist ideology that has nothing to do with a radical left politics or with combatting the remnants of slavery that they are resentfully living with, wrongly blaming on me who never had much if anything to do with it, and also doing a great deal to continue in force. This is what my experience with race in America was mainly about. I wish that the political among them who are not merely angry or resentful or determined to finally assert their will in theatrical gestures of combatting a supposed power that they theorize in one way and perform in another, I wish that they were political in their thinking enough to think about all of this more, but mostly I have found that they are not. Those among them with a real commitment to a serious political thinking merit my desire for their friendship and I do hope that some of my work will merit theirs.

"I caucus with them but will not drink with them." I have lived for many years among liberals who think I'm just an asshole who must be right wing, what else is there, while I knew I'm a man of the left, and I will give these people only my assent from my distance. I have tried to drink with them, and it doesn't work. So I write about an art form.