Liberated to Death

the only liberation that has actually occurred is the liberation of capital

“If you accuse a big corporation of particular financial crimes, you expose yourself to risks that can go even as far as murder attempts; if you ask the same corporation to finance a research project on the link between global capitalism and the emergence of hybrid postcolonial identities, you stand a good chance of getting hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

As I’ve previously mentioned, I was approached to write a book about the “woke” political phenomenon for a UK publisher. One of the other reasons I’ve finally left social media was to have more time to work on it, as well as clearing out some of the social media chatter that colonizes any thinking one does.¹

There are three core ideas I’m working with for the manuscript. The first is that of ressentiment, especially how this manifests as a kind of religious/political philosophy in woke discourse. If anything, wokeness tends to look more and more like a religion and less like a politics, but here we should remember Carl Schmitt’s point (and Kirkegaard’s) that modern politics is anyway just a continuation of theology.

The second, which is probably the most fraught one, is the question of the body in relation to modern identity politics. This most obviously manifests in gender and sexuality discussions (around non-binarism, for example, or the debates about whether or not a pre-pubescent child can accurately make decisions about their sexual or gender identity), but what is more interesting to me is instead the way the body is seen in relation to identity itself.

For instance, consider the term “black bodies,” which is often used in anti-racist discourse in the United States. Is there such a thing as a “black body?” What makes a body black, as opposed to white or Asian? This is an important question, because the moment you start to look for race or locate race within the body, or to identify the body with race (remembering that race is a completely made up idea), you then move out of the ideological terrain of anti-racism and into the same race science that led to the measuring of indigenous people’s skulls and bio-medicalisation of Jewish, Romani, homosexual, and disabled people in the Nazi project.

But the third, which is really the most important one, is the idea of social disruption as the primary mechanism of capitalism itself.

The quote at the beginning of this short essay is from Slavoj Žižek’s 2003 book, The Puppet and the Dwarf. It was published years before wokeness, or social justice identity politics, actually became a thing, but already Žižek had begun to detect a shift away from traditional leftist critique of capitalism and instead towards a politics of identity.

What, exactly, is a “hybrid postcolonial identity?” While I’d love to subject you to some of the awful writing on the subject just for fun,² I’ll instead just tell you. Hybridity is basically a predecessor of “intersectionality,” wherein an oppressed person has several different identities all operating at the same time, at least one of which is part of the dominant culture. For instance, a Syrian refugee to the United States might consider themselves Syrian, refugee, Muslim, and then also American, and these different identities “hybridize” each other into something completely different from what those things traditionally meant.

Žižek’s point is that this sort of academic discourse was favored by capitalists over more traditional leftist critiques of capitalism itself. The reason is pretty obvious: one challenges the capitalists, while the other helps the capitalists better understand the world they are creating and ruling.

This same preference is quite obvious now, with major corporations adopting much of the talk about intersectionality and critical race theory, and the Biden administration positioning itself repeatedly as the defender of such ideas against the deplorable leftovers from the Trump years. None of the true believers in such things are ever asking why this this is the case. The younger and more credulous of the woke seem to see such “support” from the capitalists as a sign of progress, while the older and more dubious just shake these off as empty gestures or capitalist recuperation.³

Let’s say it clearly: the use of correct pronouns, the teaching of anti-racism in new hire trainings, and the institutionalization of intersectionality within laws and government institutions will not for even the briefest moment undermine capitalism. A woman as president or a black trans person as CEO doesn’t threaten the capitalist order. In fact, it will only make the capitalist order easier to swallow.

“Revolutionising the whole relations of society”

That’s because relentless social disruption in the core result of capitalism itself. As The Communist Manifesto has it:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

But rather than just quote Marx at readers, the thrust of this section of the book will be looking at historical social disruptions. One that’s worth mentioning in this essay is the “liberation” of women through their employment in factories and other modes of industrial production during the two World Wars.

Rosie the Riveter is seen as a feminist icon by many US women, yet how many of those women are actually working in factories? You know the answer to this, and anyway she was just propaganda. The women who are working in factories are in south-east Asia, and they’re sewing together the clothing that “liberated” women are wearing to their offices in the United States.

This is the kind of social disruption the capitalists constantly affect. The previous modes of production which they “revolutionised” protected women from industrial exploitation. However, the need for increased production during the wars caused this older arrangement to shatter, and instead of the lower classes protesting against this expanded exploitation, they were convinced that a kind of liberation had occurred.

Here I probably need to remind some of you that I don’t mean that women should have been forced to stay home and take care of children and a husband. The older tradition that was destroyed was instead that women should be able to survive without selling their labor to the capitalists, that a family should be possible with just one income, and that none of the work required to maintain a family should need to be outsourced to domestic servants.

Look at the material (economic) results of this capitalist disruption and you can see that there was no liberation at all. Few families now can survive without both parents working full time, while for the professional managerial class (petite bourgeoisie) a home can only be maintained by exploiting the labor of (usually immigrant, often undocumented and always poorly paid) domestic servants such as house cleaners, dry cleaners and other laundry servants, as well as all the low-waged (often immigrant also) food service workers that “liberate” such families from cooking their own food.

This all represents a massive social and cultural change, and creates even more opportunities for the capitalists to exploit new groups of people in ever new “revolutionised” ways. We call this liberation, yet the only liberation that has actually occurred is the liberation of capital.

Globalisation was also this kind of liberation. The destruction of trade barriers and the creation of international treaty organizations with punitive authority liberated factory owners to move their industries to poorer countries with fewer worker protections. It liberated massive agricultural firms to dump their production on foreign markets to destroy their local economies. And it ultimately liberated poor African children from their childhoods into rare earth mineral mines and poor Asian women from their families into smartphone assembly lines so that we could all be liberated from in-person social interactions and any sense of local community.

This process of disruption—narrated as liberation—is still occurring. Consider the media delight half a decade ago over the so-called “Sharing Economy” (by which they really meant putting-out economy). Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, and many new capitalist ventures arose to “liberate" people from only working one job: now they could turn their cars into taxis and their homes into hotels, ultimately “liberating” their dwindling leisure hours and personal spaces for the flow of even more capital.⁴

And again, another revolutionisation of production is occurring, begun before COVID-19 but accelerated through lock downs. Working from home is now becoming increasingly the norm for non-manual laborers, and is increasingly celebrated as a kind of liberation for them. Yet the old division between private home life and public work life is now further eroded, resulting in people always being at work. ⁵

Reaction is Reactionary

Most fascinating about this process, by which I also mean most horrifying, is that the resistance to every new disruption is consistently narrated as “reactionary” and therefore evil. People who believed the home should never be a site of employment for the capitalists were seen as backwards. People who thought factories should be in the countries that they sell to were seen as nationalist. People who thought women shouldn’t have to go to work were all seen as haters of women (even if those people were themselves women), just as those who opposed globalization were smeared as “Luddites.” And here we should mention that it was the Luddites themselves who were one of the first to oppose these disruptions. The birth of capitalist textile mills destroyed traditional weaving, “liberating” the poor from their own means of production and survival.

This same thing is happening again now, and in the woke ideology we see how those who resist these new liberations will be written out of history. If you are angry because your job was moved to Asia or because you cannot afford the mortgage on your house, and if those things make you angrier than non-binary gender alignment surgery⁶ not being paid for by insurance plans or a person shot by a police officer in a city you have never been to, then you are probably a backwards bigot⁷ who should be silenced. The same narration is occuring for the poor who resist punitive COVID-19 tracking laws, as in France.⁸ Though they are fighting against the ability of capitalist-aligned governments to restrict their freedom of movement and engagement in economic activity, they are smeared as “anti-vaxxers” or “covid-deniers.”

Identity is absolutely the primary site of these re-narrations. Just as women were “liberated” into the factories and thus the family was “liberated” from only needing one wage-earner, the poor are being “liberated” from making common cause together against the capitalists and instead having their lives narrated by identity struggle. What matters is not whether you can feed your family or pay your rent, but whether or not your pronouns are officially recognized in tweets by corporations and your oppressed identity status is taught in elementary schools.

We are being liberated just as the Iraqi and Afghan people were liberated. In the lead up to both of those invasions, and in all the media and government propaganda during and after, the US government and its allies proclaimed themselves as the liberators of peoples oppressed by their elected and religious leaders. They needed freedom, the kind of freedom delivered by bombs and bullets. And many of those people were indeed liberated…to their deaths.

Our liberation is brought not by bullets and bombs, because they aren’t needed. In nations that have undergone this constant revolutionising that the capitalists create, they’ve gotten a lot better at narrating their disruptions as liberation. They don’t need to kill us anymore: they already killed enough of those who previously resisted⁹ for us to understand the point.

All they need is to sell us the line they know we’ll always buy: we are being liberated. Every new disruption, every new destruction of previous forms of social and economic existence is a new freedom we need to accept, and those who choke on this narration or refuse to swallow it are the enemies of that liberation. Those enemies need to be silenced, threatened, fought, and shut out of all public discourse so that our liberation can proceed.

It deserves another essay, and it will get one, but I’ll leave you with a final observation about what fighting those enemies has looked like:

“We may not always be able to change someone’s beliefs, but we sure as hell can make it politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly to articulate them.”

That quote is from Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, written by Mark Bray. It was published in the first year of Trump’s presidency, timed perfectly to profit from the hysteria about Trump and the rise of the “alt-right.” That quote, taken from the section “Everyday Anti-Fascism¹⁰” is preceded by an insistence that everyone who voted for Trump was racist and transphobic and we should end friendships and family relations with them. In that same section, the writer insists:

Our goal should be that in twenty years those who voted for Trump are too uncomfortable to share that fact in public.

In the United States, anti-fascism quickly “creeped”¹¹ from a desire to stop the rise of nationalist movements to a campaign of terror against leftists who suggested something bigger was going on than mere “white male rage.” Soon the same tactics used to make it “politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly” to express racialized views were used against anyone arguing there were underlying economic crises causing people to embrace these views.

I’m one of those people who survived these campaigns and continued despite how “costly” people tried to make it. There are many others, though not as many as there once was. Despite how much effort has been put towards smearing us as “fascist” or “third-positionist” or “class reductionist,” they never succeeded in silencing us.

Those of you reading this who might be worried that speaking against these new disruptions and the woke religion that has arisen to defend it need not be so afraid. They can silence you only for a little while, push you out of public discourse and shame you only so much. Your voice is your own, not theirs, and the more you insist that this “liberation” you are being offered looks a lot more like terror and death, the less power their narrative will have over your life and the lives of others.

1. The easiest way to understand how this happens is to take a few days off from social media and notice how you’re nevertheless constantly composing updates or tweets in your head.

2. For instance, this introduction to an academic paper on the subject: “The boundaries of hybrid cultures are negotiated and able to absorb diverse cultural influences: borders are active sites of intersection and overlap, which support the creation of in-between identities. Hybrid cultures are antagonistic to standing authority and cultural hegemony —hybridisation engenders diversity and heterogeneity, once framed as bastardisation.”

3. Recuperation is the process by which the capitalists assimilate and neutralise any ideology which threatens it. “Greenwashing,” in which capitalists use ecological language to sell products that promise to save the environment, is a kind of recuperation.

4. It also “liberated” housing from the reach of the lower classes in many places, so much so that large cities like Berlin passed laws to make Airbnb illegal. The reason they did so was that there were no longer enough vacant apartments available to residents: they had all been quickly snatched up by large Airbnb investors instead.

5. When you can physically leave your office, you can physically limit your work. Cellphones previously “liberated” us from being no longer available to an employer when we clock out, and now our offices being in our homes has “liberated” us from ever actually leaving our office.

6. Yes, this is a thing. As opposed to transition surgery, non-binary gender alignment surgery is for people who identity as neither gender and wish to have all binary sexual characteristics removed.

7. The “leftist” narrative about these people, which is really the capitalist narrative, is that they are all white people reacting to a loss of privilege. In cases where these people are not white, they are re-inscribed as white (thus the introduction of the term “multiracial whitenes”). It absolutely must be stressed that these reactions are not inherently white, nor is there actually some loss or transfer of privilege occurring (black wages haven’t increased in an inverse way to the reduction of white wages—everyone’s wages are stagnant). Labeling economic concerns as “white” concerns is precisely the trick of woke liberation.

8. The fight here is against the new “health passport” in France, without which you cannot use public transport to leave your region, eat at a restaurant, go to a bar or cafe, or attend any public indoor event. For more discussion of this, see the latest episode of Empires Crumble with myself and Alley Valkyrie.

9. For instance, the Black Panthers. While so many woke anti-racists see themselves as inheritors of that tradition, they are nowhere close. The Black Panthers demanded an end to capitalism, not better representation in the media and more self-reflection by white people in corporate training seminars.

10. An obvious nod to the primary internet site of woke political propaganda during that same period, Everyday Feminism

11. I discuss this in my essay on Alexander Reid Ross working alongside ex-CIA operatives: Mission Creep: Exorcising the Anti-fascism of Alexander Reid Ross.