If it's not about race, what's it about?

(This latest ranting thought piece is (also) about race. It is and it isn’t, and I think it’s important both for its that and its why.)

The American police state is also sustained by liberal ideologies driven by the media which try to keep all contestation on the subject of the oppression of minorities and women.

That has a simple consequence if you are a white male: You are guilty. Then they make sure the person who fucks with you is black or female. Then they go to town pretending that your hatred of the violence perpetrated by the corporate and military state (using American social values that are easily if thinly masked by pretensions to political correctness) is "racist," "sexist," etc.

All any of this means is that the Democratic Party affiliated elites have their own style and set of ideological talking points that are set point by point in opposition to those of the Republicans. And the function of all this is to keep the wheels of the machine spinning.

For cannot the Republicans and Democrats both show with factual evidence that their claims (mostly about how they are right because the other faction is so scandalously wrong) are verified as (compellingly) true? Of course they can. The wheels keep spinning. If you attend a university, you may learn how to play the ideological discursive game.

Liberalism was a lie. "Conservatism" now is open thuggery. “Who would you rather be fucked by, Mao or Johnson?” (Godard, Weekend). Both are constantly represented as each other's only possible (available) alternatives. That means: there is no alternative. And that means: get back to work you lousy bums, and keep busy picking up your straw so you can improve your success and assigned happiness, boy.

Black rage is often employed (literally) to have fun harassing white kids by showing them what it is like to be treated as a slave. Such tactics (organized by capital bosses, but with the willing participation of many people who think they are proving that they are not slaves, because their problem is not with their bosses, but you, loser) are not just comically nasty, this surely is also interesting.

The Civil War was the not victory of black Americans, though the war was fought partly in their name. It was the victory of a modern urban industrial and financial capitalism over something more violent whose traces persist everywhere in our culture and are expressed in conflicts taking a form that gives them no possible resolution. There’s a lot of profit made in keeping things the way they are. Why not sell guns, promote anger, maintain segregation and get black leaders to promote a spectacular, commodified, and largely false cultural separatism? The victorious ‘liberal’ dispensation has involved the development of a forms of social control that are essentially irrational. When an American disagrees strongly with something you have said, they won’t say that they do and why. Indeed, corporate culture is fundamentally dishonest, because managers are taught to manage people (workers and customers) using rhetorical tactics. These tactics are part of the American business style. It is very “flexible,” as we Americans are, very creative, yet not rational in this sense: propositions are not asserted that you can say no to, except at your peril. The social theorist Stanley Aronowitz long ago said that today power is psychological, and whenever that fails, it turns to violence. What we have now, and what American “Liberalism” is, is a total state. American “conservatives” in the Republican Party have been noticing this for decades, ironically (is it?) articulating some of the same criticisms the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School did when speak of the “totally administered society” (compare the Reaganites’ “administrative state”).

I am trying to learn to do business in America. I am continually struck by how difficult it is to do business with Americans and employees of their companies if you think the way I learned to, which admittedly would have worked better had I been more effectively socialized into the class of persons who usually are employed in higher management or professional business management related fields like law, instead of studying in humanities fields where you learn to think in socially critical terms but wind up working for people (or being a hapless consumer) who is endlessly encountering people who treat you as a childish slave to be managed, in the way it may seem (I share this perception with some people educated in Europe, as I partly was) most Americans actually want to be treated. Affective management is the thing now. The United States differs from France (at least if you are of the middle class and not a banlieusard; to our credit, it is we Americans who care so much more about social equality that most people I have met could not give two cents of a damn for the high culture to their credit is often treated as more important by the French than money and the things it buys) in that America has no strong legacy of the scholarly traditions that here mostly figure in the “science” used in business and war, and otherwise treated as a factory where stuff is used that can give the possessor power. Americans do not think philosophically. I suppose if I learned jazz that would help in doing business with Americans, though I would rather get the business over with and spend my time learning how to understand the world I live in. Some Americans want that too, though I see it as a business society, a company town writ large where everyone is a team player pursuing in authenticity some true enthusiasm that might be your calling card at social events. I retain the somewhat stupid presumption (its causes are truths but its effects are unhappy) that I live in a society where I can expect to be treated unjustly, because American society does not value justice, except as retribution and punishment (all the scoundrels!), and has no social solidarity, only the idea of liberty, violent liberty often. It was at least a great idea.

Of course, someone exercising power over you will always take you out if they feel insulted. This is consistent with the militarism of today’s corporate state. Of course black Americans are far more “authoritarian” in the militaristic sense than white Americans usually are. The reasons are several, obvious enough. They may also be fortified with justifying resentments. They want to remind you it’s part of the citizen’s (once only “the white man’s”) burden. Corporate policy everywhere, which kids learn in schools and colleges, is that no one may be offended by anything, and everyone might be offended by anything. I thus concluded that in today’s (media?) society:

A prudent person (who wants to get ahead) must: Never say anything, to anyone, about anything. If you do, you take your life into your hands.

The politics of race, gender, and sexuality are mostly a distraction. Capital hates everyone.

You are invited to join in the hatred. There's money in this purse.