Note from my underground

“The interesting thing about meaningful discourse in American social life is that it does not exist. This is related to the fact that indeed “everything is political,” which is another way of saying that statements that have a meaning are by nature controversial, and if what is said must be agreeable, then you are talking only to enjoy company and not because your manner of being in the world is that of curious people who value what is interesting over what is merely comfortable.

I take it that the fact that it took me so long to realize this is because my middle class upbringing left me a bit unrecognizing of the way things are with our society and its institutions, such that being mistreated would always surprise me, though the experience was frequent enough to leave me full of enough bad memories to nourish spiteful sentiments of the kind that would trouble anyone who thinks one is guilty for ugly feelings because they must be inclinations to crime for which you have only yourself to blame. Eventually, I would console myself with the recognition that the important thing morally speaking is only what you do.

Social life in America is a set of support groups just as all meaningful activity outside school or work is in a voluntary association that is a sports team or something like, a little corporation or, like your classroom, a game that models corporate office or sales shop life and prepares you for it. Talk is very important in American social life. Young men and women share, feelings for girls, various fetish objects, abstractions, collector’s objects, little obsessions for guys. Beyond sharing there are also opinions. Now opinions are not argued, but they are declared. The unstated rule is always that yours had better be the right ones. This happens in social settings maybe after the likes are shared. What movie or band do you like? Don’t tell us what you think, but give us a vote. When it comes to opinions, they are not argued for, but declared, because everyone knows already what is in and out, so the point of this game is to like a political idea that the others also like; otherwise, you’ll be called out. To what may this be compared, if not the organization that calls out offenders to the social norms in terms of what may and may not be said, and here too this is never up for discussion because the boss or leader of the moment always knows. So what you say, if it does not open up a line of discussion others want to join, is called out (Zap!), meaning you are. What determines this is the corporation as model of social life, which is to say capitalism, which is ‘democratic’ only in the sense that often, especially in America, team players call each other out. Expecting that everyone play the game with the team by the understood rules, which is the most important thing to know perhaps in getting along with Americans, along with their constant need for affirmation and flattery (dissent in American can you punched or worse: a rule there must be, never speak truth to power or a word askew to a neighbor, they won’t like it, and if someone doesn’t like what you say or do, that can be bad news indeed and very fast), people police each other. That’s how we are democratic. Not because people get together to argue about problems and work out carefully some solution by struggling with the matter; that only happened in political groups, like in the 60s. Now everyone works together as if they were a family, and of course the boss is mom or dad. If the group members are of a similar recognizable social sort (e.g., all female) then it’s de rigueur to engage in a bit of false condemnation of men, who are all bad, the better to coalesce under the bright warm aegis of the little pseudo-convent. Now with the statements people make, all such statements being treated as order-words (the speaker may hope for this), the point is not to engage in a meaningful debate (here it is useful to note that the American Congress does not have such debates either, unlike the British parliament: politicians in Congress make statements posturing for the media, constituents, and donors, and otherwise what substitutes for principled debate is the rhetorical attacks of rival prosecutors, and the deal-making, since America is a business society that belongs to private property, government is a business, and the subjects, who may be workers, are suspected of the liability to disobey. Consequently, in American social life generally saying anything to anyone else is usually pointless. Even friendships can be like this since Americans have difficulty distinguishing the stranger and the respect due them from the intimate, whom they always expect really wants, personally, what they are selling, in all innocence, just as the questions people ask you, which a thoughtful person might recognize as skeptical with a hint of hostility (but you can never say this in America), are asked for motives that may not be asked about. America is a society in which power relations are everywhere present and disavowed. That is why and how Americans are such idiots and at the same time (hardly a contradiction) so wonderfully nice (always meaning they need you to be). Thus I constantly remind myself at parties and in public places, with every acquaintance I strike up that seems so delightful at first glance, of my motto, to shut up, be patient and listen, remembering that I will soon be back at home where I can freely think and write.

I would have to learn to be cool. Cool doesn’t mean things don’t bother you, it means you aren’t reactive in such a way that you would likely be blamed for being the messenger of what you register as annoying, which very possibly you are right to consider it to be. Cool does mean you don’t cultivate a hatred of those whose behavior you find loathsome. That sounds contradictory, but it is not if we allow that it is necessary and good to judge people’s behavior as well as the general state of things. Much in our Protestant Christian culture denies this; it strikes me as a concerted effort to promote and police good feelings so that everyone can go on pretending to be happy whether they are or not, since social injustice is a matter for policy, politicians, and opinions to which all good citizens are (privately, thus meaninglessly) entitled, but being unpleasant is intolerable and warrants exclusion from the company scene every time. Since I was a brat, I am learning to be cool. Does that mean I accord everyone respect? I know that is demanded. My answer, unfortunately, is no.

Let me note what this has meant for me in terms of the liberal politics of (policing attitudes apparently about) race and gender, by which I mean, perhaps only, those persons exercising or claimiing some kind of authority and power, often that they are wielding as enforcers in some institution whose bosses welcome their pride in their identity, as if that were what is at stake, when it certainly isn’t, not that much for them, and not at all for you,. So I expect liberals to accuse me of racism, sexism, and all the rest, while they basically mistreat me as the slaves they are determined to prove they no longer are. And I do understand.

This means I expect be hated by the authorities at the top representing capital, the state, the institution in question, and rebels on the streets of every neighborhood. I will be victim of pogroms since I look, apparently, like a rich white Jew who owns everything, and punishments, since the bosses, whatever they are, will take me to be a dirty rebellious slave.

There is one group of persons who claim to be on the left who I have found unremittingly hostile to my thinking this way, though in a way and for a reason that are false. (Feminists, soon to be further vilified). This is easily proven by pointing out that if you reread the above remarks and ask if what might be the gender or whatever other identity marker ‘in reality’ of their author; such things can be marked or remarked, presented or represented in a discourse or text, but the status of such indications is necessarily fictional and hypothetical with respect to any process of verification. That so much American discourse is a police discourse is linked to the fact that people care so much to know such things, and think they are important and to be insisted on. You may ascribe an identity to the author of a text if treat statements as public bids for confirmation of status (acceptable or not: if everyone is posturing in public space, and all statements are treated as such whether they are so meant or not, then people are candidates for the enjoyment of taste and subject to a vote). Yet you confronted with a text, which exists independently of the accompanying embodied person of its factual (as distinct from implied) author and all and any circumstances pertaining to said person. This is a fact that is routinely denied in our liberal culture, because it is empirical and positivist, sophistical and relativistic, implicitly oriented towards the world of public affairs as represented and defined by the mass media, and always aims to counterattack, while feigning disinterested neutrality, as in the infamous ‘university discourse’, making everything trivial and irrelevant because psychological, so that all substantive claims are undermined, the listener may realize with a smile, by the mere fact that all meaningful statements must be either mere opinions or exaggerations, since anything like mathematical precision is the province of snobbish and hypocritical fools, who are undoubtedly assholes, almost always men, and, feminists all know, may be presumed to be closet rapists, at least in our dreams. Or intolerant pedants who must really be Nazis if like me they have (conspicuously non-Jewish) German names.

In reply to which I observe that feminism as we knew it (I remember the 1980s) is always articulated as an intolerant discourse of policing that merely assumes that men are always looking to transgressively violate women’s property right. For, you say, now liberated, those who were once slaves to masters are now masters of themselves, and in their place, you had better obey, boy, or else it’s curtains for you. That sounds like a joke. When I was a student it was not a joke. I mentioned this to female professors and graduate students, and they all seemed incapable of understanding this simple point. I learned that whatever shit happens to me doesn’t matter to them. That’s because liberals are false leftists, and in this way: they believe that one demographical (and voting and nonprofit sector donating) bloc is oppressed, and they refuse to listen to anything you say once they see you as countering their narrative. American feminists are a nightmare I am proud to say I share with many respected female persons whom I am perfectly content not to awaken by reminding us all that it was perfectly absurd, those days we remember, when you had to pretend to have only good feelings all the way down towards each and every actual and possible member of every class of persons designated as such. Dream: I went to the party where they staged the revolution, almost everyone I met there introduced themselves by an additional name appended to their familial cognomen designating their demographical category. And I remembered that Nancy, Susan, Becky, and Sarah all of them are Women, this is their flag hat t-shirt proper name and career portfolio to boot and of course I had better show, ahem, Respect. And in this dream I showed respect to Mr. Black and Ms. Hispandex and all the rest. I respected, I mean, yes sir, Respected, them all, or so it seemed. I went around the room. This revolution also had a guillotine (no kings! - the feminist caucus later split over whether this applied to female monarchs as well, the Americans slow to grasp their English counterparts’ reasons for not sharing their enthuasiasm, but then again Americans are enthusiastic about anything they want to believe in, vote for, buy or sell) but I am not sure what it changed other than what people called themselves and how they talked at the party.

Before I left, I ran into the lady who runs the company I was working for. She said, I read what you wrote recently. It’s smart. But you’re talking in an accent, which I guess is British. Since I think you are American, I expect you to be American. Otherwise you are not authentic.

Oh the importance of being authentic. You can guess I divide readers and possible friends between those who think you must be true to the way you “naturally” are and those who do not, and also that I find it unamusing that the possibility of some amount of gender divide on this question, which I think is real enough, indicates some enforceable obligation; it does not. Of course she did not want me working for her organization. She seemed to be quite personally offended. And I thought, as I ambled down the empty street, another female boss with her self-righteous outrage. I then dreamt I passed a march where some young men and women were carrying a red flag and chanting against a war and a factory closing, where many of them were working. The crowd eventually thinned, and two women were left, dressed in business suits. They wearing t-shirts that said, “We are the revolution! Power to women!” One of them had a red flag in her hand that a comrade had passed her, and she glanced briefly at it and threw it away. I watched as they eventually turned into some building and walked up the stairs. They glided easily past a faux glass ceiling. I woke up and it took me a minute to figure out what city I was in. The boss accused me of being theatrical. I understood that to mean I had better place myself utterly at their disposal. The boss added, “You must understand the importance of being and recognizing where you are. You seem distracted, like you’re not really here. Do you even know what day it is? Look at me!”

I noticed photos of her husband and kids on the table. So she’s authentic, I thought. I confess I had the distraught reflection that she’d almost be willing to take great risks to prove it. It must be real important, and nice I guess, to be able to insist so on being who you truly are.

I don’t hate women, he insisted. Work and language are neutral to me, impersonal. I admit to tending to dislike working with people who seem to dislike me. Yes, I find that to have been many people, and no, I do not believe this fact or possibility inculpates me. As for you giving me orders, is that what social equality is? Every class of persons is such that its members are entitled to give others commands, and enforce obedience to their persons, compliance with a set of rules and expectations they may give voice to, and, especially whenever their ‘person’, or yours and your relationship to theirs, can be imagined by them as brought into play, their private property right?

Feminism never made any sense outside the revolts of subjected persons, and the only relevant classes are such. Gender is not that. The claims were exaggerated. And fascism is false leftism, it always starts as such, appropriating demands attributable to revolts of the oppressed and using them to create entitled empowerment for the designated ascendant set of persons.

Marxism erred this way when it mistook the logic of capital for the personal rule of aristocracies, which was possible because the two overlapped enough they could be identified, and were. Feminism itself has no adequate critical grasp of the logic of capitalism or bureaucracy, and cannot, as race and anti-colonial theories cannot, because it is logically and structurally possible for any type of person to rule or be ruled, the structuration of this changes, and no form of identity politics is able to fully recognize this. This is how so much of the left-liberalism of the post-1968 era fed the path to fascism. The conservative-liberal quarrel that results is merely an argument within the capitalist class. The identity-political left always overstates particular histories with their narratives, resulting in blindness to the ways members of the groups so ‘justified by identity’, as we might say in a take on a Reformation-era debate on ‘salvation’ in Christianity, can easily wind up serving oppression. The other problem with every political social movement is that it assumes a closure of history, which opens onto an unknown future, by a theory that empowers a new state formation. That produces dogmatism. The feminists I remember from the 1970s were a new elite of bosses, armed with their own supposedly progressive ideology. Some of their claims and gains were wonderful achievements, but I look, with Walter Benjamin, for the barbaric and ugly downside in civilization. The dirt. The ladies I met were very clean. I don’t think many of them ever worked in a factory. They might have been rightly disgusted with authoritarian fathers (and mothers?); so was I, and they helped bring to widespread attention how awful it is when men think they own their female partners. That some former slaves acting as masters are right to resent that slavery they knew, I well understand.

Victims who have a guilty conscience and could become perpetrators if they are not careful? Might this not be all of us? The worry about it is an affair of English and American puritans whose ‘radicalism’ is ‘bourgeois’ indeed. This is what carceral, implicitly fascist, feminism was. Thank God now identity politics is dying. Political tacticians of left-wing movements will appeal to its memes out of prudence; they are undoubtedly judging rightly there, just as the progressives when they achieve democratic socialism will perfect the pastoral state and the biomedical apparatus of social control that is at the heart of its more social democratic tendencies, preferable indeed to the murderous ones that triumphed under “conservativism” by the end of the 70s (with Thatcher and Reagan, and their successors including Clinton, Obama, and Biden as well as the younger Bush and Trump). The social democrats proposing to manage everyone’s life might well respond favorably to the demand, were anyone to make it, that the psychiatric institutions of incarceration that cannot fail to appeal to young professionals drunk on the happiness of managing others, among whom the women may be kindler and gentler than their male counterparts, or might harrass and threaten consequences worse than taking the person’s life, all the while maintaining the pretense so amply supported by the state when its quite often murderous functionaries are able to access the rhetorics of female, black, etc., victimology and direct it at the people they are authorized and instructed to threaten, punish, torture (prison is a form of torture) by any means necessary. Such persons deserve the murderous imagination that I devote wholly to my creative worker, and among those who have participated like concentration camp kapos (who of course can be of any demographic), I have said openly that I merely wish I could bring them to trial in order to destroy, not their life certainly, nor their liberty (these women and men, whom I consider pieces of disposable garbage in terms of what they say and do who are certainly as worthy of kindness and decency as any son or daughter of any mother are petty stooges a standing threat, I would ask any system of justice we had that could be appealed to and believed to be concerned with justice in fact as our social institutions are not, that these people be brought to just, publicly tried, and removed from a professional life involving any public trust, which they violated with me and are part of a system whose very existence is, in a sense not specifically sexual at all necessarily, a form of rape.

The “democratic socialists” or social democrsts will improve the apparatus of management. They will do so with leftists like me as skeptical fellow travelers who, like Genet on Palestine, will go with them only until they become the new power and retaining a careful distance whenever they seem to do so, as feminists in the corporate/university world did in the 1980s). Suppose for example that all prisoners, even ‘medical’ ones, had access to good reading material, and the opportunity to engage in free discussions not led by members of the professional carceral (“medical and therapeutic”) staff. Suppose that no medication could legally be given to any person without their consent. Suppose that if asked to sign a document you would be free without punitive consequence to refuse.

Suppose further that if you have been subjected to this violence and you positively and openly hate and declare your hatred for persons effectuating it, and some of them are noticably black, female, gay, Jewish, or anything else, by way of the American identity political bullshit thing, that supposedly entitles them, as it does not. And suppose you sometimes feel that you hate them just for that. For example, many black Americans are far more immune to being bothered by violence, because they are used to it. The progressive magazine n+1 did not like what I have to say about such matters, and Jewish Voice for Peace did not. But some brothers in the joint did, and when it comes to women, I divide. Psychiatric bullshit judgment says that I am evil to do this because to think in terms of good and evil is something only evil people do according to the enforcers of good. See, the puritanical and carceral character of feminism which is of its very essence, along with the phony radicalism of the black “left” that empowers foolish thugs like Eric Adams and Clarence Thomas, who are only “disappointments” to those black “leftists” who remain identity political nationalists, all this led to and is ideological part of the current American military genocide. And I claim that I and many others in this country are victims of this same murderous apparatus. Our medical system is a form of biothanatology. It kills.

To return to my lighter register: Among liberals, no one may attack anything if everything is personal, which means dissent is hypocrisy, which means you should just shut the fuck up. Victims who might be guilty, who could be perpetrators themselves? Fascism needs to desperately claim innocence and so for the other to be guilty. I prefer the leftism that proceeds not from a set of truths about what is just so much as a set of questions in the realm and refusals and opposition in that of practice. To be against the capitalism we have does not require having a reliable image and map of what we expect will replace it. Mistakes will be made, some awful; we will judge them as we must and continue to oppose what we know is unacceptable. When you oppose what someone else is doing, you are not obligated to have an authorizing ticket that entitles you to act. “I don’t like it” ought to be enough. What most of us don’t like is suffering that could have been avoided, one’s own or someone else’s. That is motivating, the purpose of idle talk is to keep people from doing anything. If you have an enemy and they are smart, they will want to do that.

The progressive utopia is a school or university classroom. It is a church of good citizens. The market world’s utopia that displaced it is of fun. Young girls and boys seek to become good citizens or successful rich assholes. Many are. The identity quarrels of the 70s won many victories that no longer matter. My ethics is not truth or enjoyment but the interesting. In this schema, the substance of success is failure, like that of the world and life. Classrooms are ok, and better when they are less like prisons. The United States is a carceral corporate state. Now it is run by gangsters. It sucks. That’s funny, you say. Is it? No, it is an operation of murder that is routinely blamed on those it targets.”

”In the lunchroom, a lady walks around observing all of us kids. If she says something on the floor, she picks someone and says, as nastily as she can, ‘pick it up.! She says that very nastily. Liberals would object to this only if she used a very naughty word, like if she said, ‘pick it up, n….’ (or ‘white boy’?). But no, she knows the rules and how to observe them. So she just says ‘pick it up’. Some kid is stupid enough to say, “But it’s not mine, I did’t drop it.” “Pick it up anyway” is the inevitable reply. We hated her and all like her. I don’t see any reason to mince words. We all considered her a bitch. Ok it’s just her job, you say, and she’s got a union card and all that. Sure, it’s better policy to be smart, tactical and strategic, work with an organization, only oppose the oppressors in a way that might work. And what is that? I went to college with scores of women like this and young girls training to be, and they made that very clear. This is indeed ‘bourgeois feminism’ whenever they speak that shit. It is shit. These people are like prison guards, and we were like prisoners, or trainees to work in some place where we would be treated as such. We knew it, she certainly did, and so did the school administration employing her. I go to my polling place and it is a school and there are nice black ladies there handing me my ballot and I know, as always with them, I had better be polite, respectful, say yes ma’am thank you etc., and as a matter of fact that usually does work and is right, and not so bad, except on this one point: they are enforcers of, when possible, the best possible form, for their kids who want to get ahead as they want them to, learning job skill, basically that is what matters, this is America, and they are enforcers of a disciplinary society and with them it is very very obvious. They never liked me at all and I could always tell the moment I walk into one of their places. My first quarter at Berkeley I was still living in the homeless shelter. To middle class people, that would be quite the scandal about me if I mentioned it, which is an interesting fact about them, surely. If I slept on a sofa in the lounge in the campus student center building, someone would call the police and they would escort me out. At the shelter, I encountered a black lady who made a point of speaking my name, Heidbreder, like she was expressing an outraged notice as she emphasized the first syllable. She made it clear I was maybe some of kind of problem. Clutching my Nietzsche book which was my class reading, I tried to explain to her that I would like to be able to go somewhere and return a bit later to claim the bed I had been granted as a result of waiting in line. She didn’t understand this; “look, we have a television!” That semester and for several more I registered two weeks after the semester, you could do that, that was to wait until I had the money to pay my registration fees. The police would tell me to get off campus if I didn’t already have my student card. Later I got student jobs and they were tending a seat in some office and I was hired with one question only always asked, “Do you have ‘work-study’ funding?” which meant the government paid the office department one half my wage as a supposed form of financial aid to me. The university’s petty administrators everywhere enforced obedience and were generally pretty nasty. If they were female, they almost always had the attitude that that made them entitled and if I ever challenged any policy or anything, that was not tolerated in California, and they would always get me on my attitude, usually saying that I was ever nervous or expressed anger, and they had a hair trigger it seemed for ascertaining that. Most administrative personnel were female, some students and some professionals, though a few were male, and it made no difference. Once I complained very politely that I did not have four dollars that day to pay my fine to the philosophy department library. The young man got in my face and shouted at me with rage, “Pay your fine!” Now of course all these people were liberals, and of course if I had said anything back to this man, I would have been the bad guy, and always was. There is more to tell about Berkeley, but I note that among the mostly female administrative personnel I was always treated with suspicion and contempt, apparently because everyone in California is perfectly calm and not being so is considered a crime so extreme that if she has a trace of feminist ideology about her, you can expect to be treated like a virtual rapist, and that is not an exaggeration. Further, several professors and many students in the English and other humanities departments where I did my coursework were explicit and militant radical feminists who all made it clear that women being women are oppressed by men being men and they are mad as hell and not going to take any shit from you. So I could not be too surprised about what happened to me. I am still angry.

The standard line then on the ‘left’ was that of identity politics and intersectionalism. Little discussed was that this fits the professional class. I guess the poor could die and so could a lot of gay men across the bay in San Francisco (this was the 80s). (This was not talked about much at Berkeley then.) Michel Foucault, who had come to teach there every winter, was one of them. Few people said anything about this. My position is the liberal-left progressives were and are expressing, as militantly as it suits them, an ideology of (the Democratic Party affiliated wing of) the professional class, their interests being in advancing their careers unimpeded even and maybe because of their demographical identity. In the coop where I lived, some of these same people accused me of “violence” when I expressed some contrary views; they then started attacking, as liberals do, my manners, tone of voice, etc. Once I finished up a paper on Sartre’s Marxism in time to return a set of books to the library before the midnight closing time at which I would be liable for hefty fines. I there encountered a lady in charge of the circulation desk who hated me, and had made that clear. I had one day two years earlier been astonished when two of her (female) subordinates started to shout me down, in a way liberals commonly do, after I said something that I think offended them slightly, and I had walked away and then thought I would return and try to apologize, so I did, and I said, “Sorry, what I meant to say was ——” “Excuse me! Excuse me!” one of them started screaming and she called this supervisor, a certain Laura. This Laura came and looked at me and said, I am asking now to leave this area because you are very angry and that cannot be tolerated. Oh my God. A professional female says “you are very angry.” Later I would routinely hear her speak my name disparagingly to her colleagues whenever she saw me. So this night I got there at 11:00 and she proceeded to start an incident, for which I could be blamed. She knew she could do that, and she knew she could use her administrative authority to get the university’s administrators on her side. She proceeded to delay checking in the books until after midnight so that I would be ‘automatically’ fined $500, a huge amount of money for me then. She started yelling me that I have to follow “the rules,” though in fact I was doing so and she was not. She was trying to provoke me. I said,
“You are only using this ‘rules’ rhetoric as a weapon.” And I called her a bitch. I believe both statements are true and rightly uttered. Of course that was tactically a mistake, giving her what she was looking for. This is what people in the corporate and university world (which is part of the corporate world) do when they want to fuck with someone. They always know that they can use their administrative authority. If you react angrily, bingo, you’re the criminal. They set you up. And if you are a man, it is virtual rape. Every expression of anger of a man against a woman was defined by the feminists, and this was carefully elaborated in the official feminist theory taught in seminars to eager young girls aiming for corporate and university careers, and they lapped it up. I was not sorry then that I expressed my outrage, call it hate if you want, and am not now. A university administrator made clear he was acting on her behalf. They accuse you of something and then acts simultaneously as supposedly neutral adminstrator and as prosecutor. That is how universities work. That same administrator allowed a black student security guard to hit me in the eyes, knock me to the floor, shattering my glasses. He could have blinded me. His supervisor, a black woman, was never accused of any charge, and the adminstrator, a ‘student conduct officer’, said I was responsible for him hitting me. His job was to protect the university’s corporate investment portfolio and its financial interests from possible lawsuits, through a preemptive strike against the victim of the violent act for which the university itself was responsible. I had no way of hiring a legal team to attack the university or of fighting his attempt to get me thrown out, and this cynical man knew that. He made clear to me that it is a horrible crime to call a woman a bitch and a cunt because that implies to him a history of violence against women, etc. This professional female hated me and wanted to destroy my career and life. California is often like that, and the university world is. I hate these people still. What can I do about it? I am a writer, that suffices.

This story has other elements (much more to say about life then at Berkeley), but I note that I always have considered myself on the left. I consider that defines my identity as much as anything, and it was certainly a carryover from a few years earlier when memory of the Vietnam war was fresh. I know my self-designation is highly debatable. I do what I can to push this envelope. But what the university world considered that and what I do are not the same. If we talk about what really goes on, I think it might become clear that quite a lot was and is covered about by all that phony progressivism. Progressive is a good word. They are not radicals but future administrators. You won’t find such people in street protests or at barricades. They don’t care about who they step on either. They care about their interests, and what they are able to identify with them. Carceral feminists and their theories are part of this. Their defense is typically to claim that anyone who criticizes, or attacks verbally as I do, what they do is on the right, because their Democratic liberal faction was and is in competition with the conservative Republican one that did not want Affirmative Action and speech codes. But I say that because that is most of what they wanted, and it fits the police state logic, and the subsequent wars, and America’s becoming a state that imprisons, tortures, and practices genocide, these progressives helped pave the way for today’s neo-fascism and what they do is part of it in the larger sense that bureaucratic capitalism always is.

Among the students I met none even questioned the administrative rationality of the local corporate state. That had happened in the 1960s, but was unheard of in the 1980s. The student government had a Student Advocate. They were supposed to represent you in conflicts with the administration, but they did not do that nor want to. I was told that that is because most people who are charged are guilty. (If the administration’s claim against you can be validated and verified, they are not interested in defending you against it.). They actually acted as if their role was of mediation and support, to help poor kids deal with the bosses who, of course, are supposed to be right, because one thing everyone in the university agrees upon is the importance of an administrative apparatus enforcing proper behavior and especially attitudes, as with Americans corporate organizations, profit, non-profit, and governmental, generally. Progressivism is not leftism. Leftists are in opposition and resistance. We don’t believe justice is an aspect or function of the adminstrative rationale of the state. But most people working for such an institution do believe that. Try and explain to anyone, your doctor for example, or most lawyers, that you see this as a problem, and they will only wonder about your mental health. In America to be political is to be concerned about how the administrative apparatus of the corporate state should best handle the people it manages.

I conclude with another anecdote. One boss at an office job on campus decided she did not like me. She called me into her office to tell me she was giving me my check, and that my services were no longer needed. The check was written to my name spelled as “Head Snider.” I looked at it, and said, what’s this? Let me see, oh that’s a mistake. What will you do if I tell you you’re a liar and what you are actually giving me is an officially worded ‘fuck you’ as a form of employer harassment of me as a worker? Of course if I had said that, she would have threatened to have me arrested. As many doctors and others have. It is defined as assault if you tell someone you know that they are (using institutional resources and bureaucratic tactics, often blatantly throwing it right in your face as she was doing) to threaten you. They are deploying a standard tactic in the common sense discourse of American social corporate and business social life, one that many people who are not bosses will do in daily life, seemingly unrecognizing that this is what they are doing, which I think is always half true and half not. Generally Americans are liars. Corporate America is based on dishonesty to employees and the public, it is not called that, but it’s pretty obvious.

That is what fascism looks like.

We can wonder what we can do about it, but if you are honest with yourself and don’t want to be deluded fool, you hate it. You probably hate the people doing this shit too. Why shouldn’t you? I didn’t say attack them physically. I never did that. But you don’t have to, and the point for them is that disobedience is “violence” and what constitutes that is defined so broadly it is as if the Talmudic idea of a fence around the Torah and its obligations is operative in this (secular protestant, or business) world as a fence around the requirement that everyone subjected to the power of capital through its bosses, and their commands and demands, obey and give no sign of not doing so with willing enthusiasm.

I think some of these people should be thoroughly violated virtually in the most exquisite work of art. Real violence to me is a horror I always recoil from immediately and in the most visceral and unambiguous way. And that is exactly why.

Systemic violence is normal and is never called violence, it is always called order, necessity, the rules, obedience, etc.  The people enforcing it are liars.  Its purpose is to defend capital, against any and all threats.  We might call it “the police.” 

This is how I define what is and is not “left.”  Progressivism is not left.  Few people are.  Most people support some form of policing.  I trust the democratic socialists to make some of this a bit less horrible.  That’s the limit of my trust, though it’s enough for me to give them my active support.  They don’t all like me, but I stopped seeking to be liked some time ago.  Though I admit that like everyone else I am vulnerable to enjoying the good feelings the corporate state depends on.  — And that many of its advocates will prosecute as viciously as, so much in this armed camp of property owners, who, no wonder, are so fond of their likenesses in that national armed camp many of them seem to  think of as their favorite Mediterranean resort.    

When they attack you personally, they always say they are personally offended by you.  Often it is not even what you have said that they call it, but something else about your behavior.  That is because if they criticize what you have said, this would imply the possibility of some kind of debate in which their own actions can be put in question, and power is always unilateral, and so never allows that. “Communicative capitalism” pretends otherwise, and progressives love this; its purpose is to tie up your thinking and knots and waste your time while keeping you, once targeted, from doing anything except moving in place.  So don’t talk to them.  We talk with our friends.  Most people will attack you or what you say personally, usually in some trivial way, if you seem to be outside of their idea of the normal.  They may also try to get you to admit that they silent majority they stand for is right, because the basis of justice is not a truth but a common sense, since people are right simply in their very being.  This goes with identity politics, and the demands for authenticity (be true to your ‘real’ self).  Then everyone who is a claimant to any demographic identification will be expected to dance their little hatikvah (for example, in the 70s (understandably, as it was far better than the enforced silence it replaced), gays found theirs), having come home to the proper place of their absolute self at least.  That is also fascist, though it doesn’t know it is and is often nice.  If you speak to liberals, they will make sophistical objections, so the best thing is not to.  I write instead.  Of course the liberals, normals, and bosses are always right, in the sense that they can can cite information to validate their claims, which are claims to property and the right to command.  One common sophistical retort is the tu quoque argument: with a jerk of the knee, whatever you have said is just mirrored back to you, to show that you have been offensive by saying something they don’t like, so they are returning the gift, which is an insult, because they think it’s shit.  So they say, what you say is true of yourself, it’s a projection.  (How could it not be?). That means: shut up.  Be quiet and mind your own business.  Or say and do as you like as long as it’s what we think is good, or the bosses do.  Fascism in America has been in preparation for a long time.  The society was in so many ways already that.  In combatting it, and thinking about how best to, that is probably worth recognizing.