How I hate and love America

In the America I have known, we all hate oppression.

And the government fears much of the populace for just that reason. They have therefore constructed history's most massive police and prison state. The health care system is part of it.

When confronted with someone exercising oppression, we hate it. Foolishness is hating the enforcer. He or she may be a happy enforcer for the company bosses who has no moral decency at all, or may be just doing their job. It doesn't matter. They will provoke violent affects (hatred) as they express them, but that may be part of their job.

I am learning to be cool. That means not cultivating in their presence affects of hate (nor expressing any meaningful thought I could ever care about, since the way I was trained to think that involves disagreements and therefore worries those who need only compliant participation) toward people doing things I do not, in fact, appreciate at all.

If you are an enforcer or salesperson of the American corporate state, I probably do not appreciate what you do.

Brother, sister, it's not personal. I know you're just doing your job. But once you start identifying your person with what you are doing as employee and expecting my show of appreciative identification for this mode or node of the corporate state, then of course all I can do is make sure the papers or commodity exchange is in order, which is legally proper, and I hope you have an interesting life, though of course everything about this being sad, ....

Many of these people have little effective moral sense. That's sad. But they are not the ones to be combatted. In fact, no one is, exactly, just a system.

Under normal conditions, no one knows how we or any of us might do that.

This country was founded in a revolution. It didn't go very far. It established a merely representative democracy that is manipulated by people with money. It also did not abolish slavery. Much of the country's governance has been about putting down revolts or stopping them before they get started.

The country was founded on some great ideas. The institutions embody them more weakly than the popular culture often does.

It must because I liked those ideas and some images of rebellion against what is called tyranny (authority when it is seen to be unjust) that I have found much cause to dislike this country.

I did not like it when I was mistreated by bosses. When they were not abusive, they allowed me to do my menial tasks while being left alone until they no longer wanted me. They made it clear enough they owe me nothing, but I owe them everything, including my soul. This debt is said to be owed in the name of democracy. America is a giant company town, a corporate state with a bunch of teams superficially competing with each other, which can be energizing and maybe fun, and all organized and run quite similarly. It is a company town that belongs to us, in the way we are expected, including by ourselves and each other, to think and feel about it. We are so happy the society we live in belongs to us, and everyday enforcement of an allegiance we are supposed to be born into is mostly done by family, friends, and companionate coworkers. This is such a wonderful idea. It is only unfortunate that it is a lie, since the corporate state belongs to a bunch of company bosses and rich people using sophisticated financial instruments, and whose only concern is their own well-being and that of their families. Which is fine in itself of course.

Only they don't need us any more than they need the peasants of any poor country in the way of oil fields or possible new high rises for rich tourists.

That, and not romantic quasi-revolutionary romanticism gone bad (which is part of the immediate problem), is what explains the wars of US and Israel against Palestine and so many of the people of the middle east.

I am thus not so much guilty about our relationship to the Palestinians as I think I can claim a piece of the general rage because we have a common enemy.

The affect of participation I want to cultivate involves no flag, no allegiance, no pledges thereof, no confirmatory affirmation that I am also one of the normal people in this place. It is only and especially solidarity with other victims.

I could be on the side of the perpetrators in some active way, we all could be, and I am in a passive way I hate because I live under the government whose principle responsibility some of these wars is, and I don't agree with the media discourse that it's for me to judge whether my country is in the right because Russia or some other is so in the wrong, that's not my business. It is part of my concern to oppose the evils happening closest to me that I can oppose as best I can.

I expect to be treated with violent injustice by women and men in authority, and normally disposed of some good sense and reasons they are prepared to elaborate in my presence or against me, just for expressing these thoughts. This happened to me years ago almost as soon as I set foot again in this country after living in what, in some ways and from my point of view, is a less oppressive one. I am still angry about this. I have vowed to always remain angry about the injustices to me while expanding the scope of this concern. I can do this without needing any guilt.

In the most tangibly real sense, wars are against people, they are only ostensible against other governments (rival complaints to power operating with limited regional autonomy as states or non-state partisan military enterprises). Fascism is the capitalist state at war against its own working class and often fueled by their active participation. Foreign wars mobilize the domestic working class, which helps increasing production, and they kill massive numbers of people who are represented as important acting subjects, heroes or villains, and thus significant for war and governmental 'politics', for economic ends that are legitimated by a set of ideological discourses that engage useful affects.

The United States has not fought a plausibly legitimate military conflict since 1945. It is a corporate military state. Its institutions are not devoted to the needs and wants of people like me. As a young man, I wanted to study out of curiosity, and a sense of the political that is a heritage of growing up in the Vietnam War. Both of these motives, especially curiosity, were discouraged.

The Israeli American war (it would not have happened without American backing and funding-- and the pressure this country could put, if enough of us backed pro-Palestine and antiwar candidates, on the Zionist state would surely lead to the end of Apartheid there and the beginning of the transition that is sure to come to a state that is equally home to several million Palestinian Arab and Jewish persons) ended my ability to want to think of myself as having anything important in common with those in the Jewish world who are on the side of the bosses. Though I admit that always bothered me.

I stopped even caring that anyone thinks this is anti-semitism. I will listen to such criticisms if it seems to me they are relevant to the questions driving the political radical left, which is anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, etc., and otherwise I am deaf to them. What I mean by that is intelligible on Spinozist terms: hatred of people involved in promoting forms of social oppression, while perfectly intelligible, may be itself an inadequate idea (Spinoza thought hate to be that) and may in consequence be inadequately effective practically. That is the sole and sufficient form reason to oppose left-wing anti-semitism politically. (Morally, perhaps, one should not hate anyone, but that is a moral problem and not an immediately political problem if what is bothering you at the moment is a force outside you that you identify with sufficient reason as a cause of your suffering and as unnecessary because this force can be opposed, defeated, removed, or transformed (if you could persuade the enemy to join your side or throw down his forces and quit the fight against you). So if you are peasant who doesn’t like how the police working for the absentee landlords living in the city or on the manors are treating you, and you notice some of the police are Jewish, the problem with antisemitism is not that it is sinfully immoral but that it is a tactical mistake to act in the way driven by an incorrect or inadequate analysis of the situation. Jews and blacks are in similar situations. Anyone can show that the culture is wonderful and its most important potentialities are good.

The problem here is with any identity politics. It effectuates a massive depoliticizing displacement.

There were Jews who supported Mussolini at least until he allied his government with Hitler's and began deporting Jews to Auschwitz. I could be friends with such people if I were able to bracket such concerns out of my mind, but I am not. I have been told by some such persons that they are not subjected to anything, except in the mythical past. I don't believe this, I am not willing to.

We are slaves, the masters are not persons but capital. That thought is not entirely true, but it can be, and is in part and in some parts of space and time.

The reason I do not feel free living in this country is that I have always known that any moment someone who identifies, sympathizes with, or supports forms of social domination I detest with all my heart, might turn and look at me and wonder if I'm not one of those dirty rebels who, in their imagination, must be a criminal.

Rebellion is always imagined by the bosses and propertied classes as violence. It may or may not be.

But that is why I am not free. If the person I am speaking too thinks and feels like a manager, they worry I'm a rebel.

Worse, some rebels, who may have far more cause than I ever did or likely will, may hate me, thinking I'm the responsible cause of their oppression.

That makes me doubly unfree. This is true socially and politically.

There are no free masters since they must all live in fear, and as there are no free slaves by definition, there is no liberty if there is a form of slavery.

The left divides from the liberal center on two points here:

-Have all forms of slavery been abolished?

(Marxism says no, capitalism is slavery).

-Is this about types of persons (or attitudes), or systemic?

(Liberalism says it is about types of persons or attitudes, and the entire black bourgeoisie made affirming this its project after 1968.

That's why Clarence Thomas worships Malcolm X. Isn't that funny.

I am because of such considerations prepared to say that most attitudinal black militancy is misguided in its thinking. From my point of view it is unfortunate that these errors increased violent crime I have reason to fear, and that our government opted to counter only with violence and incarceration, which is designed to prevent people from using their creative powers of thought, which is also why I was threatened with it on false (medical) pretenses, rather than facilitating art and education. 'Education' in this country is only offered people while young and as a way of paying for the opportunity of more interesting, or less uninteresting, employment, the legitimate purpose of which is to make money. Which the fund manager class does not mind.

Make no mistake: the black bourgeoisie that dominates its culture the way bourgeois elites do every national and other cultural formation has a great stake in disabling persons like me by calling us racist. Did I ever fall for it and take the bet? It's easy to. Several million people with what I think is a very inadequate schooling in the matter follow their bourgeoisie in this. They will say they want to eradicate racism, which to the company bosses is only a bad attitude, and the bosses and police will comply, at least in the half of America that sides with the victorious party in the war that ended official slavery. The black and white bourgeoisie will always keep combatting forms of oppression that are articulable in terms of identities and demographical groupings, which governments like ours (which counts them and tells you they are important, as France's does not and, for better and worse, will not). But they don't oppose my subjection and don't to see any sign in their presence of my refusing it, especially if they have the identity while they are doing the enforcing. So that means they think it's all about race. That's a lie. Race is a lie used to enslave groups of people and explain why this happened.

Clarence Thomas doesn't share Malcolm's politics but would like to believe he does because he thinks black people were enslaved because they are black, which logically means oppression is not a problem for me unless it oppresses my people, which is what all bourgeois nationalism believes because its idea is to empower a people, and that always means a national people, with a specific language, territory, ethnicity and history, perhaps even religion.

I think Louis Farrakhan, who hates all white people and Jews, and black power capitalism, are fundamentally similar. The problem with what happened with Zionism took a similar direction.

I conclude tentatively that the idea of a people or nation is a mistaken one that attached to the idea of revolution that remains with us as an inspiring memory because people would like to feel more free than they do.

This is not a psychological matter. The capitalist state promotes that idea through the medical apparatus.

Sure, they will help you manage your life. So that you can be most "successful," so that you "function " well (after all, we are like workers with various tasks and obligations).

None of these managers, very kind people that some of them were, ever had much curiosity about what I wanted to do or thought important. If I spoke about how I see the world, they listened with the ear of a police officer wondering if I was threatening some violation of their codes of conduct for the people who have to be managed.

Not offered anything, just managed.

Learning, study, art, anything you find interesting or want to do?

You can study somewhere if you can pay for it and if you find a place that will accept your application to work there. It's like applying to a company. Only today getting a job is a privilege, you're lucky, and you have to pay for this. And they are eager to manage your efforts to do so with some fairly thick policing techniques.

This is the America I have lived in. Among its teams.

There is more about this country that I dislike than like. I can learn to love persons by being with them, that is universal.

Surely the answer is to give Caesar what is Caesar's and try to get away and on with your life and productive work doing things you think are important, as best you can. The only problem with this is that the neoliberal capitalist order tolerates this, which is sufficient to indicate that it is not enough. It is that corporate state, globally, that we must oppose; it is that which opposes and oppresses us. This tells me that a politics driven by affect is less interesting that it once maybe ways. If you want to stay with your affect and connect it with your view of the social world you live in, you must do this in art. Ideally at least, anything you say about almost anything anytime to anyone anywhere is just irrelevant, and that is good enough maybe if it means you can go on working because they aren't likely to interfere with you. Instead they just control the funding, in decisions you have no say in. (Which is also true in political organizations run on the corporate model and answerable to no one except their governing Board, and which have corporate 'missions' that are about projects that have justifications that when spelled out make such perfect sense. I have interesting memories of that; one of them, which supports - and seems to want to claim ownership of - a cause dear to my heart - expelled me and still has not replied to my criticism of them, as I am sure they only would by personally counterattacking in the legal model of corporate politics).

I think this is a country whose government is at war against its people, using various strategies and tactics. What can we do about that? It’s alright to have open questions.