Why I am (on the left) and not a "progressive"

American political activists are intolerant. They are intolerant in the same way that American corporations are. Those that are officially "liberal" or "progressive" use supposedly progressive concepts as memes (concepts that are enforced, not discussed) to sanction and exclude violators of their norms and rules of participation. The basic norm is that no one may be offended, because everyone must be encouraged. This is a form of the broader social norm that people must be enthusiastic team players apparently expressing their autonomous desire as the will that identifies with a shared project. This shared project officially defines communities formed by voluntary association on what is in fact the model of the modern corporation in its non-profit form.

Identity politics has been made law in America and is a principal ideological driver and tool of corporate norm enforcement. No one may be offended, because their identity is protected. An identity is, legally, a governmentally recognized type of person. Everyone has a demographic type in the contemporary American state. Your right to assert it and enjoy this self-assertion, even with militant expression including outrage at obstructing or offending dissenters from your great you, is absolute. It is now protected by American law, though some progressives have fun engaging with reactionaries who assert in a similar way their fascist identity formations with the explicit purpose of denying you yours. Individuals in America have rights. Your self is protected. This is a form of property right. You have a property right in your person. This is one reason why after the 60s a form of feminism moving then increasingly to the right was primarily focused on policing possible violations of this right in one's person, which of course is bodily. The justice of this demand was not what the more radical left might question; rather, we wanted other things, perhaps not instead but also. In any case, rights in America are linked to self-assertion. And to the threat and possibility of violence. Which companies worry about. Though mainly they worry that someone will be made uncomfortable by something that someone has said. Consequently, there is not much free speech in their domains, or at least it stops as soon as someone can claim that the statement that contradicted their belief somehow negates their person. Happily, the legal protections are mainly for demographical categories. In any case, whether you make much or little of it, you belong to types of person according to the government.

This is bureaucracy. Progressives have no problem with this, the left does, and in a different way from the right. The United States is not a democracy in which people are always contending with each other about ideas and the forms of social life and the state. Freedom to do this exists only in art. The US is a pseudo-democracy in which everyone must equally be recognized while keeping each other in line. This is closer to fascism than democracy. It is not a liberal democracy either. It is the egalitarianism of the sports team. If groups are organized around social and economic roles, it becomes what Mussolini called corporatism. This was a component of fascist ideology. The American model is above all the sports team, but also the office group and the army unit. We are team workers, we Americans, and in this way we get things done. Since this form of social organization is a consequence of the modern corporation and its nearly complete hegemony in American social life, this society deserves to be called a corporate state in both senses.

Similar to demographic typologies in a way is medical psychology, which is the corporate state's principle tool of management, everyone has a personality type, which according to the psychiatric institution, which has official government backing, is officially an illness, because persons today are for capital and thus government a set of risks, a liability, though it is also possible for the managerial state to consider persons as having not illnesses but behavioral dispositions, which might be "positive" ones to be encouraged and not only negative ones to be controlled and, if need be, sanctioned. Psychiatry and psychological management science may be moving in this direction. Then your disposition will only be considered an "illness" (potentiality for crime, which must therefore be sanctioned if it "passes to the act" and controlled while it remains a potentiality) if and only if the indicators of "threat," risk, or liability to capital and state begin to appear prominent enough on the doctor, therapist, or other social manager's radar to warrant an escalated intervention. Note that the identification by authorities of such potentialities, which make you a risk for capital, are independent of your intentionality, and also of whether or not you are suspected of being cause or effect of a criminal action. If they suspect you of being a possible target of one, you are equally a risk to them. They are not there to help you achieve any purposes of your own. They want you to be comfortable with your available social opportunities, do your job in a way that causes, functionally or operative, few or no manifest "disorders" that would require their reparative attention, and otherwise to "have no problems." (As angry Americans sometimes proudly proclaim when they are demanding something of you, who might "have problems" if your behavior does not meet their expectations.) They will never ask how they can help you be more creative in your artistic projects and friendships, and this is a good thing because if they did and you listened to them, whatever. you do would, by way of being more compliant, become less interesting. These people are police officers of a kind. If you're lucky, they are good cops.

The corporate state is a psychological state. This is an avatar of the old state church with its idea of universal original sin. These notions mean that people must be objects of suspicion, and managed. Most people support this management without realizing it. They want it for others, and for themselves. "Liberalism" in America is this. At the limit, liberalism does not recognize any social criticism; its very existence is an effort to render the political as such impossible.

Democratic socialists could not change this setup if they wanted to, and they don't.

It is a feature of our form of capitalism that most speech in public settings functions primarily in a functional, operative, and thus performative manner, and only secondarily to convey information about some domain of objects in the form of what are recognizably (also, and strongly or weakly: weakly is "polite," strongly is "challenging") criticizable claims. The latter would be prominent in a society that is a participatory democracy and has a strong sense of the public character of statements. The former is prominent in a corporate state. There statements are moves in a game, the moves defined tactically, in terms of what they speaker wants. Professionals in the American corporate state are trained to take for granted that their speech has this form. This means that persons under their authority and power will only be able to recognizably make statements whose function fits this frame and whose meaning is determined by and a component of this function. Consequently, you literally cannot speak truth to power.

Individuals today are subject to social control in the functional interest of capital and its state (the managerial apparatus, which includes non-governmental organizations of various kinds and much informal social interaction among citizens/residents). The official progressive left does not oppose this. Perhaps it cannot. We may call the left properly so-called the tendency that would oppose this (if we could). It has much prominence, in the intellectual and art worlds, and no governmental power, nor any prospect of achieving much of any. Progressives, or left-liberals, can only recognize the expression of any such thinking in (governmental) politics or discourse about it, or in a public space where the inference of some such possible expression or will to realization is manifest or inferred, as being on the right. Though in fact there is a radical left that is quite distinct from the right, as it also is from progressives.

The radical left has no hope of achieving anything outside the art world and university except by allying ourselves with progressives. Hence, we do so when it is a question of elections and decisions on public policy, or a public policy action of government authorities we can oppose. Otherwise, we do our creative work. Then it makes the most sense to not call it a politics, except among ourselves, as few would understand.

The social form of the corporate state extends to much of American social life. Children learn it in public schools and neighborhoods. The basic norm there is conformity. This norm is functional for American social life in a corporate state. A corporate state is a form of capitalism in which modern bureaucratic corporate enterprises, with legions of office workers serving as managers of persons and information at various levels replacing the old model of familial (usually patriarchal) ownership by a single boss. The corporate model of the enterprise achieved hegemony over the patriarchal one in the 20th century. This happened in both "socialist" and "free market" forms of industrial capitalism, which in key ways were more alike than different. The far right, especially in America, advocates a return to the patriarchal model, which along with claims of liberty that depend on it, is an ideological cover for a more brutally authoritarian form of corporate capitalism, as we have been seeing. (And one more dependent on war). The "progressive" left will extend the corporate state, and will do so more democratically. It will not, as it cannot, abolish the class hegemony of university-trained professionals and managers. Their hegemony and power cannot easily be challenged. A politics that did so would merit the name "left" in a way that is clearly distinct from "progressive" and "left-liberal" politics. Most forms of anarchism fall under this category, at least by intent and self-consciousness.

The corporate state has forms resembling a communitarian feudalism at the bottom, while it is highly bureaucratic at the top. The capitalism form of this society has considerably more inequality and violence than most socialist alternatives. They may be more oppressive and have less individual liberty, or they may actually be less oppressive and have more of it. This depends on how they are organized. The political model operative here would be a democracy that is participatory and not only representative, and would remain a liberal democracy, though possibly with liberty depending less on the market. Democratic socialism strengthens bureaucracy, but in a different way than capitalist management when it is in the hands of private owners, companies and bosses, and even more, shareholders and investors. Democratic socialism is not the alternative. It is an alternative to what we have, and the best one available now.

The main difference between mobs and social movements, which at a certain limit, usually made possible in response to crisis situations, are called "revolutions," is a quantitative one of degree of thoughtful and creative action on the part of the people rebelling.

The opposite of this is mob enforcement. This is easy to imagine. It is essential to fascism. Fascism typically draws on some "left-wing" discourses and tendencies. They are used and distorted. In cases of mass unrest, both tendencies are usually visible.

"American exceptionalism" names the fact that most Americans are not sensitive to any fundamental criticisms of the society and its systems of management and social control. The historical reason for this is the absence of a strong organized left rooted partly in the class consciousness of workers who understand that the interests of their Bosses are distinct from and potentially at odds with their own. In America there is a widespread consciousness of this sort only around race, and this consciousness is not well developed theoretically at all, partly because the identitarian/communitarian framework works against this possibility, as it does with social groups who historically and actually are not necessarily oppressed in the same way, such as women, Jews, and members of other ethnic groups, who may or may not be, and have had much success in changing this. The basic problem with racial consciousness among American blacks is that it is not linked to any political strategies with much promise of effectiveness, and when it is, it begins to lose its specificity as the expression of an "outside" in any structural way. Then they become either progressive liberal Democrats or part of some kind of left. "Some kind of" is a good way of qualifying every kind of left orientation socially and politically in America today. This would be less true if and only if instead of progressives we had some theoretically and practical consistent opposition to capitalism as we know it. Is it emerging now? What are the likely limits of what it can achieve?

It is easier to know what we should be against than what we should be far. Maybe this is a good thing. In that case, there will be much cause for protest, less for faith in anything better. In the last 50 years, there has been almost nothing of that, anywhere. What there was was defeated.

And democratic socialism was consistently defeated. Both the people in power in America and its allies and in the USSR worked to defeat the possibility. But it remains one, and it is consistently credible.

Democratic socialism is my preferred form of government. It is not an expression of a Church I want to be part of. Not quite. Such things have happened. They are problematic. I don't believe this is what is happening on the American left now at all. There are too many savvy functionaries with good education leading the organizations. I like what they do sometimes. I fear states with churches. I fear their believers. And I believe the United States is a remarkably intolerant society of poorly educated people who manifest an annoying tendency to act first and think later. People who act tend to know what they are doing, and have a certainty I fear. Among activists, creativity is much in demand. I am not an activist.